


perestroika

by campholmes



Category: RuPaul's Drag Race RPF
Genre: Angst, F/M, Love, Smut, Trans Katya, baby drag AU, gender identity issues/confusion, the holy trinity...
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-16
Updated: 2017-07-12
Packaged: 2018-11-01 10:05:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 52,927
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10919601
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/campholmes/pseuds/campholmes
Summary: She’s blonde, her wig is mostly flat with some waves and sidebangs, and she looks, if Trixie is being completely honest, a mess.(Trixie gets stranded in Boston in 2009)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> hello! this is The Fic. Trixie & Katya meet in 2009! it’s an au so it’s up to you whether drag race exists, but other than that everything in the fic is to be taken as face-value canon. trixie & katya are about the same age in this, late 20s somewhere. this fic has been… no lie the hardest thing i’ve ever written, i’ve worked fucking hard on this for a looong time and it feels amazing to have it finished. i love it with all my heart! i’ve decided to use he/him for Trixie & she/her for Katya after hours upon hours of ruminating over this fic and how i wanted to present it. but here it is, and i hope you like it. 
> 
> this fic would not exist without artificiallale, UNHhhh and matilda_queen. <3 <3 (artificiallale strong-armed me into writing this & ive never been so grateful)
> 
> ch 1 is trixie’s POV! chapter 2 will be katyas POV! coming soon. 
> 
> tumblr: katyastightass

Trixie wakes up to his head banging against the window of the car repeatedly.

Pearl is driving and she’s probably high, but it’s fine since they’ve been on the highway for hours and they won’t be hitting any real cities for a good while.

Trixie’s body is sore, mostly where his shoulder was pressed up against the belt buckle, and at the crampy spot where his head was leaning for the entirety of his nap. Kim is snoring on the other end of the seat, face up against the window. 

Trixie has no fucking clue who the first one was to suggest that they go to New York, but it certainly wasn’t him and he still has no fucking desire. Pearl knows people there and they’re going to stay with them for a week, Trixie doesn’t give a fuck, he’d rather be at home watching Dr. Phil in Milwaukee. His mind keeps repeating the “about 15 hours” to Boston that Pearl had offered nonchalantly as Trixie had stuffed his suitcase into the trunk.

Kim is making them stop in Boston for a week before they get to New York, she has some makeup friends there or something, she’s having Pearl and Trixie stay with a mutual drag friend. And Trixie is honestly tired of her friends and their friends and everyone’s fucking _friends_ , maybe it’s just because of his cramping shoulder but he’s not having fun yet, and they’ve only been driving for five hours.

Trixie doesn’t really want to perform for people, either, other than his usual crowd in Milwaukee (what usual crowd, haha) or Chicago. He feels like he’s only just found his drag persona and he’s worried that Trixie isn’t polished enough to show her to people unused to her. He doesn’t _want_ to be nervous about it but he is.

Pearl pulls into a rest stop and they all hike in to pee, Trixie taking care to buy snacks from the vending machines by the main door. 

“Hey can you take over driving when we start up again?” Pearl has sidled up to Trixie, is plunking in individual quarters for a Coke.

“Yeah,” Trixie isn’t tired anymore and he guesses that he should take a turn now. He goes out to the car, checks that his guitar is safe and sound in the trunk, touches his toes quickly to stretch his aching muscles and then sits in the front seat, stuffing his snacks next to him under the armrest. He’ll be driving for the next six hours at least, and then Pearl will take over again.

```

Trixie has driven for seven hours straight, with the exception of a quick stop for dinner in a small town with no vegetarian options. He’s exhausted and ready to be done, Pearl and Kim have been arguing in the back seat about makeup for hours and if he has to hear about if brows are going to come back for one more moment he’s going to commit murder. Messy murder. Pearl’s directed him to the next rest stop to switch again.

“I’ll sleep until Boston, you just wake me up when we’re in the city,” Trixie settles into the seat, cuddles up against the car door (ha ha) and falls asleep the moment his eyes close.

```

They pull up to the venue and park on the street outside, it looks pretty deserted but Trixie’s used to that, if he’s being honest, none of his shows really bring people in, he can’t judge.

There’s a woman outside putting up a poster and Trixie does a double take before realizing that it’s a drag queen. She has a cigarette hanging between her lips and when they pull up she stamps it out against the brick wall of the building. She’s wearing a grey tracksuit and tennis shoes, and Trixie can see now through the window that the poster she’s putting up has a picture of herself on it.

“Hey!” Kim yells out of the window, and the queen waves, nodding and smiling. She’s wearing pink lipstick and it makes her lips look smaller, her blue-green eyeshadow is thick and dark from her lashes to her brows.

When Pearl pulls to park about half a block down, the queen has followed the car. She pads through the grass to lean on Trixie’s open window. She smells like smoke and cheap perfume and her eyes are bright, bright blue up close. 

“Hi, I’m Katya,” Trixie does a double take at her accent, it’s maybe Russian?

She’s blonde, her wig is mostly flat with some waves and sidebangs, and she looks, if Trixie is being completely honest, a mess. She’s extremely pale and skinny, and short, and one thin hand is extended in Trixie’s direction, waiting for her to shake it. 

“Trixie,” Trixie takes it and the queen smiles big and bright, her teeth are perfectly straight, her eyes are wide, and she uses her natural brows. She looks delicate, and Trixie can’t help but smile back at her thick lashes and eyeshadow fallout on her cheekbones.

“Sorry, I’ve quit smoking, but, sometimes you just need a little ‘whooo!’” Katya shakes her butt from where she’s standing in the grass and Trixie can’t help but snort, who the fuck is this? Trixie can’t wait to see her perform. Katya steps back to allow Trixie to open the door and climb out of the car. Katya is holding out her hand again and Trixie looks down at it in confusion. 

“I can take this bag,” Katya says, her words rolling and nasal, Trixie hands it to her without thinking. But it’s weird. Katya’s still smiling at him and Trixie smiles back a little.

“I’m Kim,” Kim is coming up behind Trixie and bumping past her to shake Katya’s hand. Trixie’s eyes won’t come off of Katya and he doesn’t know why. Katya slings Trixie’s backpack over her shoulder and takes Kim’s hand, shaking it, her eyes flitting back to Trixie when she lets go.

She winks at him.

“Okay, you can all follow me,” Katya turns and she moves so fast, Trixie can’t keep up. Kim and Pearl follow her and Trixie trails behind after getting his guitar out of the trunk, entering the almost empty bar. 

“This is Jacques, where I live,” Katya turns around to grin at the three of them, leading them to an empty backstage.

“If you all just want to leave your bags here, then after the show we can bring them upstairs,” Katya sets Trixie’s backpack on a chair and turns to leave, but as she’s exiting she stops and pats Trixie on the shoulder, smiling wide, biting her lower lip. Fuck.

“Is she, like, Russian?” Pearl is grumbling as she throws her bag down in the corner, stretches her arms up to almost hit the ceiling to loosen tight driving joints.

“I guess so,” Kim replies. Trixie is staring at himself in the mirror. He can feel Katya’s handprint on his shoulder. His shirt is still warm there.

“She’s crazy, I like it,” Pearl says, digging around in her bag. Trixie snaps back into the conversation like he wasn’t just having a Moment.

“Yeah, me too,” he unzips his backpack to busy himself with something, he doesn’t know.

“I think she likes _you_ , Trixie,” Kim is smirking and Trixie is choosing to ignore her.

“I don’t know where you got that idea but I’ve known her for less than five minutes,” Trixie rolls his eyes, he should have known that Kim would want to harass him about the first guy they met, he should have fucking known.

They spend the night at the bar getting a little drunk, going over their plans for the rest of the trip. Kim introduces them to all of her makeup friends and Trixie likes them, they’re all nice and he loves to chat about makeup, anyways. He keeps thinking about his guitar backstage, he’s sure that it’s safe since Katya seems to be the only queen here for miles and he doesn’t know why he trusts Katya so much already but he does. She just doesn’t seem the type to mess with Trixie’s shit.

Trixie is suddenly completely wasted, like really fucking wasted. Pearl is still taking shots and she looks like she wants to find somewhere to smoke soon so if Trixie wants some fresh air then he had better go look for that now before he has to make conversation with Pearl outside.

When he stumbles out the door, feet heavy and ground cutting off in his vision, Katya is there. She isn’t smoking but she’s holding her keys in her hands and she’s about to go up the stairs to her apartment, probably, but she turns when Trixie swings the door wide.

“Hey,” Trixie likes her accent, she’s pushing her little bangs out of her eyes. Her lipstick has faded. “You want to grab your stuff and come up?” She’s walking towards Trixie as Trixie nods, turns back around to find his way backstage, get his bag and guitar. When he enters the white room, he realizes that Katya is trailing behind him, and Katya takes his backpack again as Trixie gets his guitar. “Come on!”

Katya leads back outside, up the stairs to her apartment. “Sorry, it’s a fucking mess. But you know how it is,” Katya opens the door and yeah, it is a fucking mess, she has all of her drag just _out_ , in her living room and on all of her shelves and in the kitchen. But Trixie likes it, it’s lived-in and it’s very Katya, even though Trixie doesn’t know her he can tell that her apartment reflects her personality.

“Let me get this off,” Katya is walking to what Trixie presumes is the bathroom, she’s pulling off her wig and Trixie can see her hair underneath, the red skin of the back of her neck, the beads of sweat dripping down it. “You can sit on the couch, or, whatever.”

Trixie does sit on the couch, or futon, or whatever. He lets himself fall sideways a little bit so his head is resting on the pillow and he scans the room but soon his eyes start to get dizzy and he closes them. He can hear Katya humming in the bathroom, singing off-key in Russian, or whatever language she speaks.

It seems like years until Katya comes back, Trixie can hear her bare feet padding on the floor over towards him.

“Hey, are you okay?” Trixie’s eyes snap open at a different voice, but it’s just Katya, and maybe she isn’t foreign after all.

“You aren’t Russian?” Trixie slurs a little, Katya is out of drag and her hairline is receding and her dirty-blond hair is sticking straight up from where it was pressed under the wig. She has a little stubble and Trixie thinks it’s nice, he likes the hollows of Katya’s cheeks. Katya is really fucking pretty. It’s making Trixie dizzier.

Katya is laughing, sitting down next to him. “Nope, Katya is but Brian isn’t.”

“What do you mean I’m not?” Trixie is so confused and the room is really spinning now, he should ask for a glass of water.

“What?” 

“Me, Brian. Yeah, I’m not Russian. Are you? I’m confused. Could I have some water, please,” Trixie’s eyes are closed and he thinks that he can feel fingers on his forehead.

A cold glass is being pressed into his hand and he brings it to his mouth, it drips a little but he downs it successfully. He wishes he could sleep.

```

Trixie wakes up with sun in his eyes, his head feels like it weighs fifty pounds and there’s a body next to him. His mouth is so fucking dry and he pulls the blanket and pillow up and over his head. It feels like his whole body is throbbing and maybe he’s still a little drunk from last night, which he can’t remember much of, just running into Katya outside the bar.

Speaking of Katya, Trixie has somehow ended up in her house and there are puke-green walls all around him, and now that he’s a little more awake he can tell that Pearl is next to him, snoring and pushing up into his personal space. Trixie groans out loud and he can hear a wheezing laugh in response, all of a sudden he’s aware of the smell of coffee and the noises coming from the kitchen.

“Good morning!” Katya is calling, Trixie rolls his eyes and instantly regrets it, now his eyes are aching like his head.

“Shhhhh,” he hisses into the pillow and Katya laughs again.

“I’m glad you’re awake, you should eat something,” Katya is walking up to the couch and Trixie likes her. He can’t help it, she’s energetic and goofy, Trixie is weirdly charmed by her and her dirty blonde hair that’s sticking up in all directions.

There’s a _clink_ as Katya sets a glass of water on the table with the lamp on it, Trixie’s eyes are open a little and he can see Katya’s thin fingers circling the pink glass. Her nails are flaky from nail glue and her cuticles are dry and damaged. But her fingers are really nice and she has nice knuckles with light blonde hairs shining in the shade. Trixie wants them in his mouth.

Katya’s torso is blessedly blocking the sunlight from Trixie’s tired eyes and pounding skull, and when she moves away to walk back to the kitchen Trixie whines as the sun comes back full force.

Katya snorts and Trixie can hear her pull out a mug and plink it on the counter, filling it with coffee and sitting at the table.

“You should drink that water,” Katya is saying, Trixie is about to fall back asleep from the sheer pain of his hangover, but he somehow moves his arm to grab the advil and pop them into his mouth, bracing himself for how his stomach lurches as he gulps it down as quickly as possible. He falls back asleep moments later, the sun still on his face. He can hear Katya breathing from across the room.

```

Trixie wakes up again on the futon, Pearl is gone and he’s twisted his arms tight around a pillow. The apartment is quiet but he can hear voices outside on the sidewalk, he’s sure that Pearl is out there smoking, and his head doesn’t hurt much anymore. Some fucking vacation, trapped in this apartment with a strange queen he doesn’t know and never will. Kim is off staying with her friends, and Trixie knows that they’ll be stuck with Katya for the whole week that they’re here.

Trixie pulls himself off of the futon and stalks into the kitchen to find something to eat, there’s a box of donuts on the counter that Katya must have bought for the occasion. Katya’s so skinny and Trixie feels like she disappeared in the mess of her apartment while he slept. But she’s outside with Pearl, Trixie recognizes her voice from how unapologetically loud it was earlier this morning.

Trixie munches on a donut and downs two cups of coffee, he can hear Pearl’s voice outside now, mixing with Katya’s, they sound like they’re having a good time, laughing and smoking and probably too loud. 

There are birds chirping loudly and Trixie hasn’t been out in the day yet but he supposes that Boston is nice in the summer, it’s humid and sunny. Katya is nice too, he guesses. She bought nice donuts.

Katya and Pearl climb the stairs loudly, Trixie is on his phone in the kitchen when they clamber inside, laughing about nothing. Trixie’s glad that _somebody’s_ having fun, because he sure isn’t. Katya’s hair is pushed to one side, sticking up and out, and Trixie wants to run his hands through it but he’s not going to entertain that thought. It’s unnecessary at this time. She’s weird, and he doesn’t know her, and soon he’ll be in the car with Pearl and Kim again, on the road to NYC.

Katya walks up to the sink next to him and reaches beyond his waist to grab a donut. She’s smirking and watching him eat, her eyes are knowing and he doesn’t know what the fuck she _knows_ , but it’s something about him.

Or maybe she’s just perpetually in a state of amusement.

Trixie can’t figure it out. He can’t figure _her_ out, with her shiny skin and pale eyes and blonde eyelashes. She’s pretty and soft in the light broken in lines from the blinds over the window above the sink, but Trixie isn’t looking at her like that.

He’s perfectly okay with just observing her and understanding that she’s hot, he doesn’t have to act on it at all. It’s fine, and in a week they’ll be in New York and he’ll never see Katya again.

Katya is smacking on her donut, which usually drives Trixie up the fucking wall, but it’s weirdly endearing when she does it. It’s like she doesn’t even know, she’s too focused on telling them about her show and how it came to be, how she manages it and how fun it is.

“Trixie, I figured it out!” Katya’s eyes are wide and she’s gasping around her donut in remembrance.

“W-what?” Trixie is confused.

“I’m Brian, you’re Brian, we’re _both_ fucking Brian! How deliciously boring,” Katya is grinning around her words. She sure does grin a lot, Trixie would too if he had those teeth, he supposes.

“Oh, okay, I was asking about that last night, wasn’t I. I was so fucked up, shit,” Trixie’s face is burning, he can feel it. Pearl is laughing.

“You were.” Katya is nodding and Trixie rolls his eyes at her false-somber expression and her laughing eyes. 

“So, Trixie, tell me about your drag,” Katya is making eye contact and it’s unsettling but Trixie can’t look away from the green.

“Well, Trixie is like, she’s human Barbie. And she’s way over-the-top and totally fucked. I only just figured her out, I guess, um. And she’s just this blonde bimbo,” Trixie is pulling out his phone and pulling up a photo. “You’ll see her Thursday night, I guess.”

Katya had called Kim only once to confirm after they had planned to stay with her, she knew Kim’s friends and she was willing to take Trixie and Pearl in for a week while Kim went from makeup counter to makeup counter, chatting and networking and whatever else she did with other overly-talented people with niche interests.

Katya had agreed to let them stay and had offered slots for them to perform on Thursday. Trixie is mostly excited to see Katya perform, though, since she looks wacky as hell in drag and even wackier out of it, and her Russian persona is beyond weird. Trixie is intrigued, that’s all, and he wants to know her. Know what she’s like. Know what her drag character is like. There.

“Oh, shit, I love her!” Katya’s jaw is hanging at the picture Trixie’s pulled up. “Oh, she _is_ fucked. Wow, I can’t wait to see her,” Katya is grinning widely up at Trixie through those fucking blonde lashes, and cheekbones, and light stubble.

Trixie isn’t screwed, but he could be. By Katya. And he wouldn’t mind. Shit.

Katya winks at him again and turns to start discussing where they’re going in New York with Pearl.

```

They’ve spent the entire week so far just fucking around, hanging out with Katya and eating at McDonalds, Trixie has taken out his guitar and they’ve all sat in Katya’s living room, singing and yelling and eating popcorn, drinking wine.

It’s been nice, Trixie really likes Katya. They’ve gotten close fast, and Trixie can’t help himself from glancing at Katya across the sidewalk if they’re walking in the daytime or looking across to her on her raggedy carpet in her apartment, in the dim light of her lamp and the TV, when Kim and Pearl are laughing about something ridiculous.

Trixie isn’t going to be stupid and try to start something with her. He’s leaving at the end of the week and it’s a bad fucking idea. He just can’t get the touch of her hand on his the night they met out of his head, though, because for some reason she hasn’t really touched him since.

Katya is elusive as fuck, she wanders around her apartment on the phone with god knows who, laughing about god knows what, people ring her doorbell all the time to say hello and she invites them in for snacks and conversation, she gets huge orders of books in the mail.

She spends a shit ton of time in drag.

Like, a _lot_ of time. Trixie hasn’t been in drag once since he’s arrived but Katya’s been in drag every fucking night, and she hasn’t even been down to the bar every night. She’ll be sitting on the futon reading when Trixie comes back in from grabbing dinner with Kim, full woman, pink lips pursed, mouthing the words to herself.

She looks more delicate out of drag, more unsure of herself, and when she’s in drag she sometimes slips into her Russian accent by accident, and when Trixie points it out she looks surprised at herself. 

“Trixie, come here,” she’s saying from the kitchen, she says it often and Trixie knows by now that she wants to show him something either hilarious or disgusting. Katya is silly, and weird, and kooky, and right now she has her head in the fridge, little ass sticking out, no padding under the blue sequined dress. She pulls her head out of the fridge to look at him.

“How do you feel about doing a number together?” She’s grinning and Trixie can’t stop himself from grinning back. Trixie’s been drinking wine with her all night, it’s midnight and they’re both pleasantly drunk, Katya had left the TV to grab snacks a while ago. Pearl is out with Kim somewhere. Trixie doesn’t care.

“Like what?” Katya has latched onto him so quickly, and he’s latched onto her. Pearl has been sending him covert texts as he’s been laughing with Katya at dinner about how transparent he is, but in the moment it’s hard for him to care. Or notice.

He thinks about it at night, though. On the futon in the dark with Katya in her bed the room over and Pearl so close next to him.

He likes Katya, and he can’t help it if she likes him back. She doesn’t, not in that way, but still. They’re friends and Trixie is glad that he came to Boston. He kinda doesn’t want to leave, actually.

“Well, I was thinking, something dance-y, like ABBA or--”

“Fuck yes! Let’s do ABBA,” Trixie can’t help but interrupt, and it earns him a giggle from between Katya’s glossed lips.

“Okay! Let’s practice now, I mean, we only have a day,” Katya is wheezing with laughter over it, but Trixie’s a little nervous about it all of a sudden. Katya’s drag persona seems rock fucking solid, and her personality when she wears women’s clothes around the apartment seems even solid-er. Trixie doesn’t feel like he has that in Trixie. 

He follows her, though, into the living room, where she clears a space kicking boxes and shoes aside with her bare feet. Her toenails are red, matching her fingernails.

Trixie couldn’t bear turning her down. 

“Okay, so, how about ‘Dancing Queen?’ I feel like it’s an audience favorite and we can think up some good choreography quick, I bet,” Katya is shuffling her feet around on the floor over at her speakers with piles and piles of CDs stacked around them. Somehow she fishes out the singular ABBA disc and sets it in the player, closes the lid.

“Yeah, I’m into that. You can dance?” Trixie is curious, Katya has nice arms and nice fucking legs, she’s skinny but muscular and Trixie wants to-- she has nice muscles. And Trixie has been wondering where they’re from.

“Well. Dancing is subjective,” Katya turns from fiddling with the machine to smile at Trixie and Trixie shrieks a laugh at her wiggling eyebrows, shaking hips, and tiny butt in the ridiculous blue sequins and shake-n-go wig.

‘Dancing Queen’ plays and Katya starts to … maneuver herself around the living room, stretching legs and waving arms. Trixie is almost crying with laughter at her, and then she does it.

“I’ve been practicing my newest move, okay,” Trixie nods at her, he’s ready for whatever the fuck it is.

Katya smiles widely, then positions her feet, twisted, in front of her and behind her. And she’s lowering slowly, her upper body falling forward a bit, but she catches herself, lowers almost into the splits.

And her thigh muscles are trembling, her calves are veiny and Trixie’s stopped his gentle swaying with the music.

Katya’s brows are scrunched in concentration and Trixie is… aroused. To say the least. Katya’s sparkling blue dress is too tight around the upper thighs, so she pulls it up around her hips and she’s just wearing grey briefs underneath and her dick is _right fucking there_.

Her teeth are digging into her lower lip, she’s looking Trixie in the eyes. She’s lowering painfully slowly until she freezes in mid-extension.

And then she falls all the way down, yelling _Fuck!_ as she tumbles. Trixie is on his knees next to her, their breaths are crossing and Katya is laughing, Trixie is puzzled but Katya is positively cracking up at him, she pulls her legs out from under her and stands, offering Trixie a hand. It’s onto the next song.

“I can do a full split, I’m just working on the slow splits. I’m fine, I just need to build up my strength some more and then I’ll be there,” they’re both still drunk and Trixie feels fucking insane. 

Katya goes up to the mirror by the front door, checks her lipstick. Trixie doesn’t know why, he’s the only one here and plus he kinda likes how it’s smeared, he wants to lick it off her teeth.

“I am a Woman,” Katya is turning to him, grinning, her hair flipping with her spin. Trixie laughs, but also, he gets it.

“Of course,” he’s smiling at her and her grin gets brighter, her eyes are sparkling under her lashes as she comes back over to the CD player. 

Somehow they figure out the choreography, drunk and giddy on their mistakes. Trixie is in deep, so deep, Katya smells good next to him once they’re sweating a little from dancing.

```

The night of the show, Trixie is feeling even more unsettled about his drag and his makeup and whether he’ll be able to remember the choreography with Katya there next to him, fucking with his energy.

He’s in the dressing room, pressing powder into his foundation with jittery fingers, and Katya is out at the bar, talking to people she knows, she’s in her element, fully Russian, full woman. Trixie feels out-of-depth.

But he has to do it, it’s good experience and he knows that it’ll be fun. Plus, he’s leaving soon. And he doesn’t want to think about that, for some reason, but he wants to show Katya how grateful he is that she let them stay at her place, bought them food, showed them a good time.

He’s wearing a white button-up, black pencil skirt. Trixie is blonde, usually, but she’ll have pink hair tonight, because it’ll match with Katya’s ridiculous all-pink ensemble. She’s wearing leg warmers and tiny frilly panties and a pink tank, she looks like an ‘80s fitness instructor and Trixie hates to love it. They’ll be matching, and Katya will be delighted.

Pearl comes in carrying her bags of drag, and Trixie can tell that something’s wrong immediately. She’s on the phone, her cheeks are red and she’s running a hand through her hair repeatedly. Trixie can hear her questioning _And how long will that take?_ , and _We aren’t even_ from _here!_

‘What?’ Trixie mouths to her and she shakes her head furiously. 

She hangs up moments later and collapses on the chair next to Trixie.

“So, I was just outside.”

“Yeah?” 

“And the car wouldn’t start,” Trixie’s jaw drops, he’s still painting on eyeliner but he lets his eyes flit in Pearl’s direction.

“What?”

“It wouldn’t start! And it still won’t. So I called and they towed it,” Trixie doesn’t understand how he missed so much, but he guesses that he’s been in here with Katya the whole time.

“What the fuck.” Trixie is not amused, they’ll be trapped here for god knows how long, and suddenly the bar and Katya’s apartment seem a little less familiar and comforting.

“So, but it’s okay, I mean, they say that the car will take a week to get fixed but we can just take the train to the city, but… one of us might have to stay, I don’t know, ‘cause it’s not really fair if we put all of that on her,” Pearl is looking at the door, she means Katya.

Trixie knows what she’s doing, and he can’t find it within himself to care.

“Alright, if she’s cool with it, I guess I can stay,” Trixie goes back to his makeup, ignoring the little thrill in his stomach at the thought of spending a week with Katya alone in her apartment, ignoring Pearl as she starts getting ready with a knowing smile.

```

Trixie does it, the performance, with Katya. Katya is full of manic energy the entire time, pulling him up on stage and hugging him tight through his padding, and when they’re finished with the song she drags him off the stage by the hand, sits him down at the bar, and starts chatting rapidly, in her Russian accent.

“So good! So good, Trixie, I loved that. And so did everyone else, they loved it!” Trixie can’t help but smile at her, she’s bouncing up and down in her seat and her curls are bouncing with her.

“I think so too,” Trixie realizes that he’s holding her wrist but he’s not going to let go.

“And Trixie, I love Trixie! I love her. She’s so fucked, you’re right, she’s delightful,” Katya likes to throw out long compliments and dissociated comparisons, and Trixie loves it. Katya is flouncing her hands through Trixie’s wig. “She’s Barbie on acid, and your makeup is so flawless, mama.”

Trixie is laughing, he can’t help it, and he’s never felt so confident as Trixie before as he does now.

“Well, Katya is fucked up, girl, what the _hell_ are you wearing…”

Katya is laughing loud, grabbing his bicep through his shirt, and they’re both sweaty and tired but Trixie wants to stay here forever, with her, just do drag together and hone their craft, collect tips and go out for breakfast in the mornings, fuck in Katya’s bed.

```

Katya is puttering around in the kitchen and Trixie is in the living room, digging in his backpack for his headphones.

Pearl had pulled Kim out of the door an hour ago to go to a club she’d read about online beforehand. She’d given Trixie a look as they exited, to which Trixie had rolled his eyes and turned his head in response. He doesn’t want or need Pearl to meddle, he’s perfectly fine figuring out whatever is going on between him and Katya on his own, by his own damn self, thank you very much. Plus, he has an entire week ahead of him to figure it out, now that the car’s broken down. A blessing in disguise.

Trixie can physically feel the tension between them, it’s been a week since they’d arrived and now that Trixie’s genuinely trapped here in Katya’s tiny apartment he’s just waiting for the tension to culminate. Katya is just so bendy and skinny and veiny and _pretty_ , Trixie wants to touch her.

Trixie is hyper-aware of the times that they _haven’t_ touched, Katya pulling a hand back or swinging her body far out of the way when they’re near each other, avoiding contact. Trixie has every single one of those tiny moments catalogued in his brain. And he can sometimes feel the ghost of Katya’s wrist between his fingers.

He feels like he’s living in a dream world, what with the car breaking down like an overdone romantic comedy plot twist, and he’s just waiting for the kiss at the end credits. He wants the kiss to happen sooner rather than later, before the car is fixed, and he wants to touch. His fingers are shaking with it and he’s completely sober but being alone in the apartment with Katya late at night feels dangerous, heady and heavy and jagged.

Katya is banging around in the kitchen as she does, in full drag.

He’s wondering if he maybe left his headphones in the dressing room when Katya comes up behind him, the floor creaking beneath her feet. Trixie can smell her cheap perfume.

“Is this what you’re looking for?” Katya is reaching her arm around Trixie, holding Trixie’s headphones in a tangled mess in front of him. Her arm is almost around Trixie but she’s not touching him. When’s she going to fucking touch him. Trixie is getting impatient.

“Yeah, thanks,” Trixie takes the cord out of Katya’s warm, sweaty hand. She’s not wearing nails but she has a little bracelet on, one of the beaded ones that elementary school kids wear. It’s pink and Trixie can see the beads and elastic band digging into her skin.

Trixie can’t help himself from circling his fingers around Katya’s wrist. Katya sucks in air fast through her lips and Trixie squeezes her warm skin. Trixie drops the cord in his backpack and turns to face her. Her lipstick is a little smudged on her bottom lip from biting it.

Katya’s pupils are wide and her jaw has dropped a little. Trixie is panting, he can’t seem to catch his breath. 

Katya gives him a tiny nod, her adam’s apple dropping with a gulp that Trixie can hear, and then he’s in Katya’s space, they’re touching noses and Katya’s fingers are digging into the side of Trixie’s neck. Their breaths are crossing and it’s hot up against her, she’s radiating heat.

Their cheeks are pressed together and Katya’s foundation is a little grainy against Trixie’s bare skin, it’s heavy and Katya’s fingers are tickling his neck. Trixie doesn’t know if he’s supposed to kiss first of if Katya will, but his heart is jumping around in his chest and his dick is twitching in his pants as Katya breathes onto his cheek and into his ear.

Trixie lets it happen, allows his lips to bump against Katya’s, against her vanilla-smelling MAC lipstick and he lets them press together, stumble over each other, their mouths are open and it’s agonizingly slow and Trixie’s hard dick is digging into Katya’s hip, right above where her dress ends and it turns to bare, smooth thigh.

It’s weird kissing someone with so much makeup on but Trixie’s so hard, he’s dizzy with the silence of it, the sound of Katya’s hard breaths. 

He can feel on Katya’s neck where her foundation starts, can feel her stubble through it. Trixie’s dick is dripping, Katya’s lips are burning hot on his and Trixie brings his hands down to Katya’s waist, pulls her to straddle Trixie’s hips as Trixie seats his ass on the couch. 

Katya isn’t tucked and she’s hard too, she’s grinding down on Trixie’s dick through the thin layer of her dress and Trixie’s faded denim cutoffs. Trixie’s mind is foggy with the smell of Katya’s skin and the taste of her lipstick, Trixie can feel Katya’s makeup smearing on both of their faces and it’s so hot, he’s never fucked in drag but Katya is a fucking woman, he guesses, her curly blonde wig smells like smoke and it’s getting in Trixie’s eyes.

Trixie pulls back and they’re both panting, Katya’s chest and breasts are heaving and Trixie wants to bite her nipples but he doesn’t know if Katya would want him to take off her tiny Target bra. 

Katya holds up a shaking hand to touch Trixie’s cheek and they’re fucking looking into each other’s eyes, and Katya has gentle, sharp features that Trixie wants to memorize.

“Can I?” Trixie is holding the bottom of Katya’s purple floral-print dress. Katya nods, she’s still breathing heavily and her eyes are dark and she’s smirking at Trixie’s fumbling as he pulls the dress up to see Katya’s firm thighs and to touch her black lace panties on accident with the tips of his fingers. “Oops.”

Katya huffs a laugh onto Trixie’s forehead.

“Dumbass,” she whispers, and pulls the dress up quickly over her own head, her skin is pale but too beautiful, her veins are visible on her chest and down her arms and Trixie runs his hands all over all of it, making her shiver.

Katya reaches behind herself to unhook the black bra that matches her panties perfectly, her red lips have migrated up her cheeks and down her chin. Trixie’s wrecked her and Katya’s lips are puffy from Trixie’s biting and he feels a tiny thrill in his stomach somewhere at Katya’s heavy breaths and hard dick that’s peeking out of her lace panties.

Katya hums through her teeth as Trixie trails his thumb over the lace tight against her length. 

“Yeah, please,” Katya’s mumbling under her breath and Trixie reaches up to run a hand through her hair, he can’t feel Katya’s scalp and he wants to but Katya looks hot in the messy, tangled wig, she’s smiling a little as Trixie leans in, pulling her in by the curls since it’s pinned down well, their noses are touching. She’s almost angelic, with her small features and sharp nose and little chin. And Trixie wants to touch her everywhere and nowhere, wants to spread her out on a king-size bed in a white see-through robe with furs on the arms and suck her off, and finger her until she cries, and let her lie back so Trixie can ride her for an hour, until she’s begging to come, sweaty and tear-stained but smiling, a young housewife of a mob boss, or a suburban mom with a superiority complex addicted to prescription pills.

Their bodies are so close and touching and Katya is almost completely naked stretched out over Trixie, the muscles of her thighs straining and shaking with the instability of the cushions and how Trixie is shifting his weight as Katya moves above him.

Katya’s sweat is traveling down past her brows through her eyeshadow and she’s grinding down onto Trixie’s lap, eyes half closed and Trixie can tell that he’s secondary, Katya’s tongue is pushed forward and her jaw is a little unhinged, Trixie’s hand is digging into Katya’s stomach, fingers into her warm skin and Trixie wants to be all up on her and in her and around her. And he is, but it’s not enough.

“Lemme--” Trixie pulls back from Katya’s soft cheek and his fingers bump with Katya’s to pull his shirt up and off, and he brings it over his head with Katya’s help, with her strong hands.

Katya’s shoulders are soft and Trixie can’t help but bite the skin, tickle it with his tongue as Katya huffs air out of her nose. Trixie’s fingers are rolling Katya’s nipple and Katya is still grinding down on his lap, Trixie lets his other hand trail down to where the lace edge of her panties is digging into the soft skin of her hip and slips his fingers under them, pulling them down around Katya’s dick.

Katya moans openly as Trixie’s fingers stroke her so gently, too gently, her head falls back from her soft shoulders, Trixie bites her neck softly and Katya is moaning loudly into the silence of the apartment. Trixie is still in his denim shorts and his dick hurts for how hard he is and how it’s pressing against the fabric, but he can’t help but focus on Katya and how she’s whining and how her foundation is dripping with sweat and how her eyeshadow and mascara is smudged and how badly Trixie wants to suck her dick but also hold her too tight, too close so that they’re one person and so that he can smell Katya’s hipbones.

“Cmon,” Katya is whispering and her voice is breathy and dangerous in his ear, she’s climbing off of him and pulling him into her bedroom, he’s never been before and he’s weirdly nervous, Katya knows what she wants and it’s killing him, the iron grip of her fingers around his, pulling him along through the mess of heels and boxes and hanging dresses.

He can smell her sweat and she’s unbuttoning his pants with quick fingers. When she unzips them and pulls them down in tandem with his underwear he lets out a groan, the cool air against his dick is relieving and so frustrating at the same time. Katya gives a little _ooh_ at the sight of him, half-hummed into the skin of his chest. 

She’s on top of him on the bed, her fingers on his stomach and her lips stretched into a smirk. And when she takes his dick into her mouth and the wet heat is surrounding him, Trixie can barely breathe.

“Katya, fuck,” she’s swallowing him down and it’s almost too much, he’s oversensitive from how his dick was rubbing against his underwear and shorts and Katya’s tongue is rough and hard and her eyes are squeezed shut.

She’s humming around him, he can see her touching herself, bringing herself off, thrusting into her own hand. She’s making little snuffling noises and her lipstick is all smeared, and Trixie can’t believe how lucky he is.

He taps her on the cheek to warn her and she pulls off of him quickly, pumps him twice with her strong fingers, and he’s coming onto her face, and she’s moaning loudly at it. She comes seconds after, licking him off of her lips.

“Fuck, Trixie, fuck,” she climbs up his body to settle herself around him, next to him over the sheets, her skin rubbing against his. She rests her head on the pillow next to his, brings up a hand to swipe his come off of her forehead and cheeks and eyelids, then slides her fingers between her lips to suck it off, her adam’s apple bobbing as she swallows it.

Trixie whines at the sight of her, her lashes are fluttering and he’s overwhelmed, his spent dick twitches at it and he can’t help but pull her hand away from her mouth, pull her in for another hard, long kiss. He can taste himself on her.

Fucking shit.

```

Katya sits on his lap all the time, and she’s never not talking. Trixie’s gotten used to it quickly, or maybe he just romanticizes the fuck out of it, Katya is cute and funny and _pretty_ , and Trixie doesn’t mind if she talks to him nonstop all day.

Katya has gotten into a habit of touching, touching a lot and touching when unnecessary. Trixie can’t complain, and he’s guilty of it too, Katya will wrap fingers tight around Trixie’s forearms to move his hands out of the way when they’re making dinner, Trixie’s known her for less than two weeks and he doesn’t know how or why it’s like this, how they’re already living together like it’s been years.

In the dressing room before Katya performs she’ll settle herself down on Trixie’s lap, her bony ass digging into Trixie’s thighs, and reach around to pull Trixie’s arm around her shoulders, Trixie will circle his arms around Katya, one hand around an ankle.

Trixie’s gotten used to a lot of things that he wasn’t averse to in the past, but that he had just never thought of before. Such as allowing Katya to fuck into him hard and sweaty and fast while she’s in full drag after a show or just when Trixie comes back from the store down the street and finds Katya with hastily-applied red lips and smeared contour and just a plain black bra and thong.

Trixie’s living in a dream, Pearl and Kim are in New York by now and Trixie can’t leave, why would he when he’s been fired from his job back home and he doesn’t have any bookings and Katya is here in her apartment over Jacques, dressing up for him and standing in the light of her bathroom mirror and posing a little, pursing her soft pink lips as she pulls a limp blonde wig on.

Sometimes Trixie wonders if it’s real, usually when Katya’s down in the bar late and Trixie’s too tired to join her, as he’s lying in her bed in the pitch black, listening to the muffled music and voices and trying to will himself to sleep, questioning why the fuck he didn’t leave, questioning if they’re even together, or if Katya even wants anything beyond Trixie’s ass cheeks spread around her face.

```

Pearl’s been texting Trixie to warn him that they’ll be back in two days to pick him up and start back to Chicago. And Trixie hasn’t responded, he doesn’t want to face it because Katya is out smoking in the morning light and he’s in her bed like he always is, waiting for her patiently.

He doesn’t want to leave.

It’s silly. He knows it’s silly but he doesn’t really care, Katya is too present for him to care about any of it. She makes coffee in the mornings and she just wears boxers or panties or nothing to bed, and Trixie can feel his skin against hers all night long.

Last night they had been sitting on the futon, holding fingers and twisting legs together, Katya was pushing pieces of popcorn one by one between his lips, laughing loud and screeching as Trixie tried to throw one in her mouth, landing it perfectly.

Katya was snuffling into his collarbone, biting his skin and licking his chest, and Trixie felt wound up beyond belief but at the same time so fucking calm, Katya on top of him, fingers gripping his biceps and chattering away over the movie.

“You’re very… romantic aren’t you?” Katya was smirking and Trixie knew she was taking the piss out of him. But he couldn’t help it. So he did.

“Yeah,” he smiled at her, and her smirk dropped a little bit into a more genuine, soft smile.

“Well, I don’t know much about romance, but I do know a little about cat litter and the home the Virgin Mary’s made in my heart,” Katya was still smiling that smile, and Trixie’s heart was leaping in his chest, Katya’s fingers were pushing up along his stomach towards his neck.

“Yeah?” Trixie was out of breath and he could hear the movie in the background, Katya was making direct eye contact with him and her hair was sticking straight up like it does, her nipples were hard up under her white t-shirt. 

“Yeah. And I know that I love you,” Katya was still smiling but it had faded a little, she looked like she could be sick at any moment and Trixie’s throat was closing rapidly and he was grabbing her face, undignified, her blonde lashes and thick stubble and soft cheeks. They were kissing and Trixie’s mouth was so wet on hers, she was hitching breaths in through her nose.

Trixie pulled back and both of his thumbs were resting on her earlobes.

“I love you, too,” he whispered, and there was a rush of tears behind his eyes so he closed them to Katya’s grin, pulled her in again to kiss her hard and long and to feel her tongue against his.

Katya was humming into his mouth and both of them were hard but they could wait, they didn’t have much time but they had a little, and Trixie was determined to use it as if they weren’t on a crunch. He wanted to flit fingertips over Katya’s veiny eyelids and kiss the ends of her eyebrows.

So he did, and they finished the movie. And afterwards Katya pulled him into her room again, and kissed him against the pillow, and pressed into him slowly.

Trixie let Katya fuck him from behind, hard, her blunt nails digging into his shoulders, he’d have purple half-moons in his skin in the morning. She likes making him moan and cry and she likes biting his shoulders and pulling his hair. 

Katya was holding him so tight, thrusting without rhythm and groaning into the skin of his back and his shoulders. Her dick inside of Trixie, hot and pounding and her arms around him, she was so sweaty and Trixie was so hard, rubbing against her with each of her thrusts and he wanted more, wanted her to consume his skin and sweat and wanted to look into her eyes and see her forehead and the lines in it.

“More,” Trixie had groaned into the pillow, and Katya had nodded onto his back, stubble scratching his tender skin deliciously. And then Katya was thrusting harder, inside him and outside him and Trixie was almost crying with it, maybe he _was_ crying with it, he loved her and it was overwhelming and open and on-the-edge, off the cliff.

And then something popped, underneath him, and they were on the floor, Katya still inside him, the mattress half-off the broken frame.

```

The afternoon before Pearl and Kim are due to arrive, Katya begs him to go and grab some pastries from the store really quick. Trixie isn’t stupid, and he can’t say no to her, either, he knows that Katya’s planning something. And so he goes, spending extra time discerning which croissants to buy and which muffins he thinks she’ll like.

His phone buzzes with a notification and his eyes widen, he almost drops the jug of half & half in the aisle but clenches his fingers to reassign all of the items into their proper places in his arms.

Katya’s sent a picture of her chest, down to the top of her thighs, she’s rock hard and completely naked. And Trixie can see soft blonde curls falling over her shoulders and he’s hoping to god or whoever’s listening that Katya’s wearing red lips. He’s grown partial to the red over the pink or just the gloss.

Trixie swipes off of the photo as quickly as he can, he’ll glance more in-depth on the walk home. He goes to buy the items and wills himself to not get fully hard under the fluorescent lights of the store. Or in front of the old woman checking his items and bagging them at the register.

On the walk back, he dares to open the photo again. And he’s drooling over Katya’s dick, as always, but tonight he feels a little frantic, in the back of his mind he’s on the absolute fucking edge. He could easily just leave and never see Katya again. He’s afraid that she’ll move on the moment he shuts the door behind him.

She won’t, but he doesn’t know that for sure. Nothing is for sure, except for the fact that Katya is naked on the bed back at her apartment down the block and she’s hard and probably stroking herself slowly thinking of him.

Trixie pushes the door open at the top of the stairs, it’s dead silent inside, and he puts all of the groceries away slowly, deliberately. He’s almost fully hard and Katya’s bedroom door is shut. 

“Trixie?” She calls and his heart skips a beat. 

“Yeah?”

“Get the fuck in here,” she sounds strained, fucked-out already, and Trixie is seeing double, stumbling across the room to open the door to her.

She’s spread out on the bed, knees bent a little just above the sheets and heels digging into them, black fishnets covering her pale, bare legs. Her eyes fly open to Trixie’s footsteps and she’s squeezing the right cup the black lace bra of her baby doll nightie with her long, red nails.

Trixie can see the black silk against her tights and the black lace of her thong underneath, he’s frozen in the doorway. Katya’s nails are digging into the silk and netting over the smooth skin of her thigh, and Trixie’s sweating, she’s spread out like a whore and her lips are overlined to the heavens, her lashes have never been bigger and Trixie can see her hard dick through the silk and the lace.

“Are you trying to kill me?” Katya’s eyes are half-closed and her black eyeshadow is blended perfectly, her brows are arched and mischievous. She grins at his question.

“Maybe,” she giggles, fucking _giggles_ , her voice is low and hoarse and Trixie is so goddamn hard. He crosses over to the bed, getting naked along the way, pulling off his shirt and freeing his dick from the confines of his pants and briefs. Katya is looking up at him through those thick lashes and he’s overheated, he can feel his blush in his nose, her head is thrown back and she’s still fucking touching herself all over, she looks clean-shaven and moisturized, and was Trixie really at the store for that long? He doesn’t care, her arms look so soft and he reaches out to touch.

“No touching!” Trixie pulls back as Katya’s eyes fly open, green on brown, her pupils are wide. Her lips pull into a grin. “Just watch.”

Katya pats the end of her bed past her feet for Trixie to sit. As he does, Katya scoots up against the pillow, against the wall and it’s dark but for the light of the lamp, shading half of Katya’s face. Her blonde curls are reflecting the orange and she’s rubbing her dick through the thong, she’s pushed up the silk and her stomach is heaving as she pants.

Trixie bites back a whine as she pushes the black thong down her thighs, out of the way, dick bouncing onto her stomach, leaking already, her forehead is scrunching up like it does when she watches the news or reads poetry.

And then she starts stroking herself slowly, making tiny noises. Little whines and groans, she’s being showy on purpose, she wants to give Trixie a show and make him hot and bothered. Trixie is palming himself and Katya lets her eyes flutter open, watching him, smirking and licking her lips at the sight of his dick through his fingers.

“You are so beautiful,” Trixie forces it out through gritted teeth, but she needs to know, needs to hear it.

Katya moans at the compliment, her eyes slide shut again and she starts pumping herself faster, and Trixie can’t stop himself at her tiny smile. He climbs over her and captures her plump lips with his and she moans into his mouth long and deep, his hands are all over her and she’s pushing up into him, the silk of her nightie cool against his hot skin. She’s whining and desperate but he is too. Her curls are in his eyes. And it feels like her entire body is in his hands.

“Babe,” Trixie is talking, full volume, into her mouth, Katya is panting and grabbing his ass tightly. 

“Yeah?” She whines in response and her voice is high, cracking, Trixie feels like he could faint as their dicks rub together, the heat of it scorching him.

“So fucking beautiful,” he whispers against her cheek, and she thrusts up on him and comes, with a long groan, Trixie gasping through his teeth. 

Trixie doesn’t want to come yet, he wants Katya inside of him first and he presses his lips against hers again, pushes his tongue through them to run it gently inside. Her breathing is calming down, he opens his eyes to see how hers are closed, her thick lashes are bumping his cheeks.

She opens her eyes and pushes him off, pushes him onto his stomach with strong, quick hands. She pulls his legs apart at the thighs and she kisses all up them, Trixie is sure that she’s leaving red lipstick marks. He likes it.

“Lemme,” Katya takes both cheeks into her hands, squeezing them tightly, letting her fake nails dig into the soft skin. Trixie shrieks, laughing with it, but then he looks back and she’s staring open-mouthed at his ass, eyes half-lidded and the green of them is barely visible.

“Fuck, I love you, and I love this ass,” Katya whispers, Trixie’s dick twitches when Katya’s eyes meet his, she’s biting her lip. She’s so fucking gorgeous and Trixie can’t help but wiggle his hips into the mattress to try to gain some friction. Katya’s hands move to his sides to stop him.

“You didn’t come, so you’re not coming yet,” she growls, fucking _growls_ as she pulls her head down to lick between his cheeks. Trixie moans with it, her tongue is strong and hard, she’s digging her nails into his skin and pulling, poking, the sensations are almost too much with how her sharp nose is pressing into his skin.

And when her tongue wiggles it’s way inside him, he’s gasping and biting the pillow, so he doesn’t scream with it, Katya’s tongue is warm and wet and Trixie can’t stand how sensitive he is to her, how her nose is poking into his skin.

“Fuck, Katya,” he’s whining, she’s groaning into his ass and he knows that her makeup is coming off all over him, and that’s gross but it’s so fucking hot, her hands are sticky with sweat on his skin, she’s squeezing and Trixie could come just from this.

“Cmon, lemme fuck you,” Katya’s pulled back from him, she’s pulling a condom and lube out of fucking nowhere, it’s a porno except Katya’s lipstick is smeared across her face in both directions and her foundation has rubbed off blooming into her natural skin from the bridge of her nose outward.

One of her lashes is wonky and she pulls them both off before sliding the condom on, Trixie is so hard it hurts and his dick is still rubbing against the cotton as Katya shifts her weight from knee to knee on the bed.

“You prepared enough?” Katya looks like she hardly cares and Trixie is sweating, his dick twitches with her predatory smirk, she’s just fucking hovering over him and her dick is bobbing between them as she wiggles around on her knees, propped up.

Trixie immediately grabs the lube and squirts a tiny bit onto his fingers, Katya has those ridiculous talons and he doesn’t want them inside him, god, she’s over-the-top, a woman, quick hands and soft features and gentle actions and he loves her. He slides two fingers in no problem at a ridiculous angle and scissors them for a couple minutes with Katya waiting, humming a song with no discernable rhythm or melody, Trixie is rolling his eyes but also it feels _so good_ , he has to force himself to pull his fingers out from under Katya’s watchful eyes, with her blonde lashes stark against her black eyeshadow now that she’s ripped the fake ones off.

Katya pulls his hand aside as he’s pulling out gently, and he groans with the stark absence. Katya is pushing into him, though, and she’s fucked him so many times since he’s arrived but this time is somehow the hottest, her dick is so warm inside him and she’s thrusting so hard, she can find his prostate immediately and she’s so fucking strong, bendable, Trixie’s never been fucked so hard or so deep or so good. 

“Katya, fuck, fuck, you’re so big, fuck,” Trixie knows he’s being ridiculous and Katya is probably laughing at him but he can’t hold it in, she’s all around him and it’s overwhelming. She smells so good, her skin is familiar by now and it hurts.

Katya brings a hand around against the sheets to stroke him in time with her thrusts, and Trixie is coming in seconds, clenching tight around her so that she grunts and comes with him. And she pulls out and ties off the condom and Trixie can tell that she’s not even tired yet, by how she climbs around him on all her bendy limbs and rests a soft cheek across from his on the pillow. 

He kisses her forehead and she laughs, nodding, swivels up to the bathroom to brush her teeth.

When she comes back, Trixie’s going to suck her dick, scrape fingernails along her stomach, watch her sweat drip down her temples and cheekbones. He’s going to make her cry with it, tease her until she’s thrusting up into his mouth. She’s wonderful and she came when he called her beautiful.

```

Trixie wakes up to Katya, her body all around him, her strong arms circling him. She doesn’t usually stay in bed after waking up, and he can tell that she’s been awake for a while. But she’s here.

Trixie gets why. 

“Morning,” she whispers into his brows, the sun is just up and Pearl and Kim are going to get to Katya’s at 8. Trixie looks at Katya’s alarm clock. It’s 7.

Trixie is all packed, just his toothbrush waiting in her bathroom, so he could have this tiny moment. Katya is warm, her hair is still a little damp from her 4am shower. There’s a little bit of eyeliner still there on her lower lashes.

“It’s 7,” Trixie mumbles against her lips. It’s so quiet.

“I know, I let you sleep a little,” Trixie knows that Katya hasn’t slept. He can tell, they’ve only been together for a little over a week but he knows, knows Katya, knows her like the back of his hand. Knows her schedules and tics, knows what she likes, knows where to touch her and where to not.

Trixie wants it to be the night they were wine-drunk, alone in the apartment and foolish with the thrill of it, when they didn’t have a single clue about the car breaking down, or how they would kiss, or how it would feel more permanent than anything Trixie has ever felt in his entire life.

Katya hums a little, pulls him so that they’re lying side-by-side. 

“Lemme see your dick,” she’s smiling softly, her eyes look curious and her dark circles are making Trixie tired but he smiles back because he’s been half-hard since he woke up.

Trixie pulls down the sheet to bare himself to her, she’s smiling so wide, both of their heads are turned so that they can look into each other’s eyes.

Katya slides her fingers down his stomach, tickling, and wraps her warm hand around his dick as he pulls the sheet off of her to do the same.

The sun is streaming in through the cracks in the blinds, Katya’s eyelashes are fluttering and her fingers are twitching as she touches him. Then she’s laughing and her hand is coming off of his dick, up to his face.

“You’re crying, asshole,” she’s still laughing at him but her voice is wobbly. 

“I’m- I’m fine, shut up. Just keep going,” Trixie leans in, catches her lips in a slow kiss. She shuts up quickly with it, he runs his tongue slowly along her perfect teeth.

They’re both whimpering, against each other’s lips, Katya is shuffling her shoulders against the sheets. Trixie comes first, crying out as quietly as he can with lips on her chin. And she’s coming minutes later, kissing his cheek open-mouthed.

It’s silent in the room and all Trixie can hear is Katya’s breathing. It’s 7:20 and he has to get up, eat breakfast, put his toothbrush away. Pearl wants to get going the moment they arrive.

He eventually does, after wiping both of them off with Katya’s sheets. Katya stands next to him and brushes her teeth at the same time, even though the blue bathroom isn’t nearly big enough for the two of them. 

Trixie catalogs the names of her toothpaste and mouthwash so that he can buy it when he gets home.

When Pearl and Kim pull up in the taxi, they both hug Katya and tell her all about New York, and she responds like usual, energetic and excited and over sharing about her last trip there. Trixie can see her dark circles, still, and he can see the hickey he left on her collarbone where the skin is so sensitive last night after sucking her dick until she was almost asleep.

“Well, bye,” Pearl is in the front seat of the car already and Katya is standing in front of Jacques, she has a pack of cigarettes in hand and Trixie knows that the moment he leaves she’s going to start smoking again.

Trixie walks to her as Kim is heaving suitcases into the trunk.

“I’ll see you soon,” he’s not going to cry, and Katya isn’t either. But then she’s crying, tears flowing in straight, heavy lines down her face and neck, she’s pulling a cig out of the pack and fiddling with her lighter but Trixie pulls her into him instead. “I will.”

“I don’t know,” Katya is whispering into his ear, with shaky breaths.

“I do, though, Katya,” Trixie is squeezing her too tight, she’s pulling away. But then she kisses him and it’s salty and sad, her hands holding his cheeks tight between them. It feels like fucking _Brokeback Mountain_ , when their lips crushed together, barely a kiss and more of a violent touch of faces and lips and noses and tongue. 

She pulls back first, and her eyes are red. 

“I’ll see you,” he says, and his words break in the middle of it, it’s embarrassing and he knows that Pearl and Kim are watching him from the car.

It’s a fucking cliche but he can’t look back, physically cannot turn around, and he crosses around to the passenger seat and climbs inside. Pearl starts the car in complete silence and Trixie falls asleep almost immediately to the hum of the car and the dim radio.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Katya doesn’t know how much longer her heart can ache. She crawls out of the sheets and limps to the bathroom. Trixie insisted on a night light for the wall when he was there, he’d tripped on the doorway one too many times. He’d bought a Barbie-shaped one, Katya’s had it plugged in since. She wants to smash it into tiny pieces.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 7.5k of an emotional, psychological rollercoaster ride... apologies in advance & yes... the sheer confusion of it is purposeful. hope you like! i love you if you've read this or commented on this!!!

They talk on the phone every single day. Katya still feels lost without Trixie’s physical body, it’s like she was magnetized to it for two weeks, and now it feels like she’s missing a limb.

Katya can’t believe how lucky she was that Trixie stayed for so long, she really was so lucky. And she should be happy about that. But she can’t, and it’s making her crazy… she’s not going to say that she _needs_ Trixie, she doesn’t, but when they speak on the phone Katya is instantly happy, she loves the sound of Trixie’s voice more than anything and she loves the sound of Trixie’s laugh even more than that.

It’s been two weeks since she'd last seen Trixie. They’ve video chatted but it hasn’t been the same, obviously, and Katya wants to touch Trixie so badly.

They’ve talked about what they should do. Trixie has said that he would move to Boston, he’d lost his job right before the road trip and he still doesn’t have one, he keeps telling Katya that there isn’t anything holding him down, he wants to move in with her, he would come if Katya asked, but Katya doesn’t think that she can justify it. 

She sits on the phone with him, pulling her legs over her head or pacing the entirety of the apartment, the pit in her stomach heavy and stinging as she grows increasingly indecisive.

She would feel too fucking guilty and too fucking anxious for Trixie to come and then stop loving her the way he does.

So she’s stuck. She’s talked to Trixie for a little less time each day, she knows that she’s seemed more melancholy lately and she knows that Trixie’s noticed, because he’s been asking her if she’s okay, if she’s safe, if he should fly out for a few days.

Katya doesn’t think that she’s okay with long distance. And she doesn’t know how to tell Trixie that.

Trixie still doesn’t have a job and Katya is afraid that he’s putting off getting one to see what Katya will say about him moving to Boston, and Katya wants it. She wants it so fucking badly that when she thinks about it her lungs contract, she wants Trixie to live with her and perform with her and she wants them to go grocery shopping together and pay the bills together.

She feels ugly about it, selfish, and she’s going to have to break up with him because she can’t stand that guilt. She can’t stand the thought of him waiting for her, unconditionally. It’s too much, and she’s too fucking narcissistic to be able to make a well-informed decision about if she should tell him he can come to stay. Forever.

She can’t say it, though, when he calls. Because when he does call, when she’s sitting on the couch in a bra and underwear or just a t-shirt, eating cereal, she turns off the TV or puts down her book immediately and focuses her entire body on his voice. 

Every time he calls he’s too happy to hear her for her to tell him they’re done. But she has to, she can’t let it continue to happen. It’s not good for her, to not be able to touch him, too.

```

Katya likes to think that she allows herself to feel her emotions as they come, regardless of what she _thinks_ she should be feeling in the moment.

So that’s why she’s meticulously smearing foundation and contour on her skin in front of the bathroom mirror with thighs buzzing in anticipation, she has to keep stopping herself from smiling wide in order to get the makeup in all of her wrinkles.

Trixie’s been texting her about it all day, he can’t shut up and won’t shut up, and she can’t fucking blame him. Her toes are already curling against the cool tile floor.

Katya loves makeup, she could do her own makeup all day and she misses when Trixie would stand in the doorway, arms crossed and hands resting against his sides in the yellow light, watching her line her lips with dark brown, fill them in with red. 

She likes how Trixie makes her feel like she’s his woman, how he’d follow her and watch her getting dressed with sparkling eyes, watch her push blush on her cheekbones with fingers tangled in the curls of her wig.

She’s somehow able to give her lips a straight line, and she puts some gloss on on top of the cherry that Trixie won’t even be able to see over the shitty camera quality.

He’s calling in fifteen minutes and she rushes into her room, pulls on the red lace bra, spending extra time discerning which straps are supposed to go where. Once it’s on she pulls up the red lace thong, and the flowy robe over it all. She’s eternally grateful to her past self that she’d decided to paint her nails red, she matches from head to toe and she has a new gorgeous lace front that flows in waves down her back, almost to her ass.

Trixie’s going to love it. But she loves it more.

Then skype is ringing and Trixie’s little icon is popping up, she’s migrated her entire fucking desktop computer to the bedroom table across from the bed for this purpose and she reaches across to accept the call.

“Hey,” she’s sitting at the end of the bed, back arched and legs bent before the ground, body turned to the left.

“Fuck,” Trixie is alone in the house tonight and it’s dark there, in the spare bedroom, but for the white light of the screen on his face. He’s wearing headphones, of course, he’s too nervous that someone will interrupt and Katya thinks it’s cute.

“You like?” Katya runs a hand up her smooth thigh, letting it rest at the edge of her thong. She’s already getting hard and Trixie’s little pixelated jaw drops a bit.

“Fuck, Katya, yeah, new hair?” Katya nods, giggles a little at the awe in his voice, it makes her dick twitch and she wishes he could be here so she could tell him not to touch. He’s putting his fingers against the screen.

Trixie is naked and the laptop is on his stomach. She can tell that he’s touching himself already and she wants that to stop, she wants to rile him up to the absolute edge before she lets him come.

Katya feels insane, like she could combust, suddenly, and she needs to take the situation under control before he’s talking her off and directing her hand on her dick until she comes begging for him.

“Show me,” she can’t force much else out of her lips and she knows he gets what she means, he places the laptop at the end of the bed and twists to turn on the lamp next to him.

He’s hard and Katya can’t help but groan at how he strokes himself slowly, watching her as she runs her hands up her legs, back down to her feet, traces the lines of her bra. 

“Trix, don’t touch,” she can’t see well enough but she’s sure that he’s rolling his eyes. He’ll listen to her, though. He always does. 

She climbs so she’s kneeling on the bed, thighs spread, toes clenching in the sheets. She slides the red robe off of her shoulders and lets it pool at her elbows, rubbing herself through the lace, she’s moaning for show but she’s also buzzing in her stomach, she feels like she’s floating away with Trixie’s wide eyes on her, she can smell his skin on her hands as she wraps them around the back of her neck, bringing her long blonde waves forward over her breasts and stomach.

“Fuck,” Trixie is pinching his nipple and Katya wants her teeth around it, she’s clenching them, running fingers across her own stomach and letting the robe fall off, taking it between two fingers and dropping it off of the edge of the bed. The duvet is crumpled beneath her knees and she can’t stop her brain from running at top speed, how she didn’t make the bed for a week after Trixie left.

“Take your dick out,” Katya can feel lightning shoot through her stomach, her toes clench with the sheets between them and her fingers are twitching as she pushes the red lace down, pulling her dick out.

Katya’s watching Trixie through heavy lashes, his arms and legs pixelated on the screen, mixing electronically with the orange of the lamp and the red glow of the alarm clock. She wants to be sitting on his thighs, pushing his chest down into the soft bed, grinding on his stomach. 

She’s propped herself up on her heels, they’re digging into her ass and the pain is pushing her forward, thrusting upwards into her own hand. Trixie’s hands are gripping the sheets, he’s hard and dripping onto his stomach. 

“Fuck, Trixie, need to see your ass, I want, want to touch you,” Katya is babbling, she’s almost pushed herself over the edge as she lets herself twist her ankles in circles, slide her thumb over the head of her dick repeatedly. She reaches heavy arms behind her back to unhook her bra and slip it off, so she can pinch her nipples, hiss out her breaths.

Trixie is wiping sweat off of his forehead and turning, then, onto all fours, fuck, he’s touching himself and she doesn’t care, she wants them to come together, and his ass is on the camera, he’s circling his own hole with a shaky fingertip and Katya is moaning out loud at how his hand is squeezing his own cheek so tight, how his skin is sinking soft under his fingertips.

“Trixie,” Katya says, she’s coming and bone-tired, he’s turning back around and coming at the sight of her closed eyes and exposed throat.

“I love you,” her eyes are closed still but she’s smiling at it, he loves her and fuck. She loves him, how is she supposed to dump him when she loves him like this?

“I love you, too, Trixie, oh my god,” she’s panting and the guilt is rushing up inside her throat. It’s choking her, and she wants to hang up, Trixie is looking at her with eyes she can barely see like she’s hung the stars, like he’s her boyfriend, like she’s a goddess and like she’s the only thing he’s ever wanted. He’s just lying there, watching her, smiling softly, and she feels faint with it, there are tears coming to her eyes and she has to hang up.

“I’m gonna go shower, call you back?” Her hands are shaking and he’s smiling and nodding, he looks so fucking _fond_ and she can’t take another minute of it. She hangs up the call and climbs off the bed, almost falling off of the edge, pulling off her thong and wig and running her hands across her face, smearing her makeup, she doesn’t care.

“Fuck,” her breaths are jagged and everything is fucking closing in on her, Trixie is lying in bed in Milwaukee and she’s here and he loves her and he wants to move in with her, play house with her, and her chest isn’t expanding, she wants it more than anything.

She wants _him_ more than anything, his buzzcut and elbows and nose and thighs and big hands.

She showers on autopilot, almost forgets to scrub her makeup off. She wraps a towel around her waist and sits on her bed in the dark, twirling her phone between her fingers. She’s taking deep breaths, she’s shaking like she’s cold deep in her core and she can’t stop it. 

_Just do it, you fucking idiot, call him_ her mind is saying, she doesn’t want to listen but she has to, it’s cold so she slips the towel off and climbs under the covers, pulling them up to her chin.

She maneuvers to Trixie’s name in her phone and presses call before she lets herself think about it, and it’s ringing so she has to put it to her ear.

“Hey,” he sounds tired, maybe she should make excuses and hang up so he can sleep.

“Hi,” she hates how quiet she’s speaking, can’t stand herself. she’s gritting her teeth again but this time it’s not sexy and Trixie is silent on the other end.

“Katya, is everything okay?” It’s the staple of their phone conversations, now. He keeps fucking _asking_ , and she keeps fucking _lying_.

“Yeah, it’s good,” she pauses, takes a deep breath in.

“Katya, I wish you would tell me,” he’s sighing and he knows, he knows Katya _so fucking well_ and it drives her crazy, he knows her better than she knows herself and talking on the phone every day about everything and nothing has just expanded that knowledge. 

He knows how to push her buttons and he knows how to appease her, how to pull something out of her. She knows the same about him, but it feels not fair when he uses it to his advantage, like right now.

“Trix, I love you,” she whispers into the receiver. Trixie sighs again. She wishes that he’d been asleep when she’d called so that she wouldn’t have to have this conversation. “I- I just don’t know if this is fair.”

“You don’t know if what’s fair?” He sounds impatient, frustrated. She’s not going to cry. “Katya, I don’t fucking care, okay? I just want you to think about it, okay? If you want me to come. Because I want to be with you more than anything.”

“Me too,” she’s still whispering, she’ll hurt herself if she talks any louder.

“That’s it, then.” Katya guesses that that is it. It should be that simple. And she doesn’t get why it’s not. She doesn't get why she feels so guilty, why she’s so insistent on Trixie not wanting her or needing her.

They talk for a while longer about Trixie’s latest show, and it keeps Katya off the edge for thirty minutes. But then Trixie is yawning and saying goodnight, and she’s hanging up, and it’s quiet.

The lamp next to her head is humming and she doesn’t want to reach her arm to click it off. She isn’t tired but Trixie’s made her yawn. And the apartment is still, no crashing in the kitchen or shuffling around on the futon. The cars going past on the street only make it seem more static. 

Katya is frozen under the sheets. If Trixie was here he would be warm, but he’s not, and Katya has to get used to it. Quickly. 

Every night, it’s like this. She can’t stand being without him but she can’t stand the thought of being with him. Because if she’s with him all that’ll happen is he’ll get sick of it. He’ll stop running his fingers through her wigs and he’ll go out and find himself a real man who’ll sit still and drink whiskey shots and help him write his next album.

Katya isn’t any of that, can’t do any of that. 

And she goes the next three days without answering his calls, saying that she’s been busy at work, she’s so sorry, she’ll call back as soon as she can, she loves him. Because she does, and he doesn’t stop texting her pictures of the Milwaukee sunset, selfies of him with his Starbucks, nighttime _I love you_ ’s and morning greetings.

```

Katya wakes up twisted in her sheets. There’s a long, jagged line of Russian Red next to her face on the white pillow, and she realizes that she fell asleep in full face again. Fuck.

Her phone is digging into her right lung, it’s completely dead so she reaches to plug it in next to the bed. She can feel how crusty her makeup is and how both of her feet are asleep, it’s 9am and she has no desire to get up or shower or stretch or do yoga. And she’s going to skip all of it, she knows she is, and she can’t stop the sinking dismay at the realization.

She reaches to the bedside table where Trixie’s watch is still sitting, he left it and he hasn’t even realized it’s gone, to pick up her pack of cigs and lighter and she just fucking lights one in bed, she needs it, so.

It’s hot in her room. Summer is continuing on heavy and thick and Trixie is in Milwaukee, it must be summer there, too. She hasn’t thought to ask. She hasn’t turned on the AC.

She’s filed her nails into perfect red ovals and she scratches them against her stomach now, through the sheet. It’s cloudy out and it’s humid and musty inside, and the cig isn’t even a little bit relieving. 

Trixie is still sleeping, probably, no job and nothing to worry about but that, she longs for that kind of bliss where she wouldn’t have to worry about him and her show and her makeup and if she should cut her nails and if she wants to shave her legs.

Trixie has it easy in her mind, but she _knows_ that he doesn’t. She knows that he’s spending his days pining over her, thinking of her and drawing her name in tiny hearts, texting her and calling her and touching himself remembering her red lips.

And it’s stupid, but it makes her feel foolish, chastised, Trixie is halfway across the country worrying about her, texting her if she’s happy and if she’s eating and if she wants to get a pedicure with him when he comes back.

She still doesn’t know if she could stand him coming back.

```

“Hey,” Trixie’s voice is scratchy over the line. Katya is already palming herself through her panties, she couldn’t wait and she won’t wait, not since she hasn’t heard Trixie’s voice in four days and all she’s had were little texts saying that he would call soon.

“Trixie…” Katya whines, she’s so hard and she’s already sweating all down her face, she’s never been so horny in her life and she wants Trixie to talk her off, right now, wants to hear his voice low and growling as he jerks his own big dick. Her red nails are tight around her length and she wishes Trixie could see them, his favorite color and her favorite smile on him.

“Katya, shhhhh, babe, don’t touch yourself yet,” Katya lets out a long, keening whine, Trixie is so fucking mean but Katya loves it, she can hear shuffling on the other end and she hopes that Trixie is getting naked.

“Please,” Katya moans, Trixie is laughing a little, of course, and Katya’s eyes are crossing with how hard she is at Trixie’s laugh, she wants Trixie in her bed right now-- no, she won’t think about it, she can’t afford that right now, not when this is all she might get for a while. She doesn’t know how she’ll be feeling tomorrow.

“Okay, stroke yourself slowly, now,” Trixie’s voice is so low and soothing and Katya sobs with it, pulling down her panties and she’s so wet, dripping all down her shaft. She strokes herself once, twice, shuddering at the feeling and the waves of pleasure in her stomach and her fingertips beating hard with her heart.

“Trix… Brian, please,” Katya is whispering, squeezing her eyes shut, her toes are all curled up. She wants her nose in his neck, his sweat dripping down it. She wants to be on the floor inside him after being thrown off the mattress. She wills her brain to shut up for a second.

“Damn, you want me bad,” Trixie is laughing again, the line crackling and popping in her ear, and Katya hisses.

“Yeah, wish I could, could kiss you-- wish I could touch you, I wanna suck your dick, Trix,” Katya is babbling and she can’t stop herself, she wants Trixie here so bad to soothe her warm skin and also to touch her dick.

“Katya, I wish I was there too,” Trixie does sound sad and Katya needs to veer the conversation off of these tracks asap.

“Trix, are you touching yourself,” Katya says, quickly, and Trixie huffs a laugh, knows that Katya wants the subject changed.

“Yeah, I am, babe,” Katya’s dick twitches at the pet name, nobody’s ever called her ‘babe’ before Trixie and she knows that she would hate it if anyone else ever did. But with Trixie… when he calls her ‘babe’ she feels like a Real Woman, with her sexy boyfriend that’ll do anything for her, a high-school cheerleader with her hot football player that’s whipped for her and carries her backpack.

“Trixie, please,” Katya wants to be touched so badly and she never wants Trixie to stop talking into her ear.

“Katya, it’s okay, you can come,” Trixie is panting a little bit now, Katya can hear him losing control and Katya wants him to come first, she wants to give something up to Trixie, she wants to let him have it, she wants Trixie to bite her jaw and ride her fast until she’s sobbing.

“No, no you come, lemme hear you, please,” Katya is panting so loudly, she knows, and Trixie must be laughing at her, how she’s losing control, but she doesn’t care and she’s hardly even thinking about it, Trixie is so hot and he’s lying in bed all sweaty too and his dick is in his hand and in his other hand is his line to talk to Katya and to make Katya come.

Trixie does come with that, letting out a strangled moan right into the receiver, and Katya follows right at the sound, it feels like she’s bursting with it and Trixie is still breathing heavily into her ear. Katya’s eyes stay rolled back into her head for so long, she can’t breathe and if Trixie weren’t on the phone she’d be asleep by now. But she’s awake and she wants to talk to him, wants to hear about his day, wants to listen to him laugh and joke and vent. Katya is in deep. She needs to let him go.

But she’s in love and it’s hot in her chest. She daydreams about Trixie coming back so she can fuck him hard into the mattress. She wants to boss him around, wants him to suck her dick on his knees on the floor of the shower.

“How’s the job search,” Katya can’t help it, she’s worried and Trixie’s heart still doesn’t seem to be in it. Katya’s being obnoxious and she can’t help it, she can’t stop asking him if he’s found a job and she _knows_ it’s not helping. It’s not helping her decide, either.

Everything feels off, and her panties are digging into her hip uncomfortably. She isn’t taking them off, she’ll fall asleep like this and have a long red indentation there in the morning.

Trixie sighs heavily into the receiver.

“Katya. Look-”

“Trixie. I’m serious! You need to be looking for one. I just don’t know if it makes sense! For you to come here. I feel so fucking guilty, okay?”

“Katya.”

“I feel guilty as fuck, you don’t even know me and-”

“Katya!” Katya is panting and she’s crying and Trixie sounds angry, actually angry, and Katya figures that it would be productive for her to shut the fuck up for a second.

“Yeah?” Katya whispers.

“Katya, I do know you. I love you, okay. I’ve never told anyone as much about myself as I’ve told you. And I know that you feel the same way, okay? I know that, and you don’t have to pretend. I’m sick of pretending, honestly, and I just want to fuck you and talk with you forever,” Trixie is out of breath. Katya feels even guiltier now, Trixie is right and she knows it.

He’s fucking right, he always has been, and she’s never going to get over him.

No matter if he comes to live with her or not, she’ll always have the memory of his hot breath against her cheek groaning out that she’s beautiful, pushing her over the edge, all of her muscles clenching and her skin sizzling.

“You’re right,” she resigns, it’s late and her eyelids are drooping. “I’m going to go to sleep.”

“Goodnight,” Trixie is smiling at her admission and Katya feels full.

“I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

```

Katya is spending a lot of time in the park. It’s nice out, it’s summer and even when it’s gloomy she’ll go sit on her favorite bench, she’d just rather not be in the apartment where she’s left the ABBA CD case out on the coffee table and Trixie’s watch on the bedside table. Sometimes Trixie will call her while she’s there and she always answers, he’ll chat her ear off about his show last night or how badly his latest interview went.

The instant he calls her she picks up, her fingers are programmed to do it so when she answers with a _Hey babe_ and Pearl is laughing into her ear, she does a physical double-take at the voice.

“Katyaaaaa,” Pearl is high and Katya doesn’t really have the time, not when Trixie usually calls right about now.

“Hi,” she pulls out another cigarette and lights it between her lips as she takes in the crash over the other line.

“Katya, Trixie’s here and she loves you, man,” Katya flinches a little, she’s really not in the mood for any of this and she’s suddenly fucking exhausted and her legs are aching from not stretching properly for a few weeks.

“I know,” Katya can’t even muster the strength to roll her eyes. She’s puffing smoke around her cig, can’t lift her arm to pull it out from between her teeth.

Pearl is laughing and Katya can hear Trixie on the other end protesting, trying to grab the phone. Katya looks down at the screen of her own phone and realizes that Pearl had stolen Trixie’s phone and Trixie will probably be annoyed once he gets it back, will lock himself in the bathroom and whisper to Katya in gruff tones.

“She’s not your man,” Katya can hear Trixie’s faint voice say, and her lips spread upwards of their own volition. Trixie is always out there, defending her honor.

“Hey,” it’s Trixie’s voice, then, and he sounds so out of breath and so close.

“Hi,” Katya’s lips are still curled up. “I’m your damsel in distress?” She’s trying not to laugh, and something else warm is bubbling up inside of her.

“You’re my woman, duh,” Trixie is giggling, breathless, and these are the moments that make Katya want to run home, smash on the spacebar of her desktop, wake it up to buy Trixie a plane ticket to Boston with shaking fingers and credit card clacking against her desk, meet him at the airport and run into his arms and kiss him and touch his cheeks.

“Shut up!” She’s laughing, though, and he knows that she likes it. He can tell that she’s in love with him.

She’s working on her own trepidation and she just fucking misses him, more than anything. Now that she’s surrendered and given up it’s hard to imagine him actually coming all the way to Boston for her. 

But giving up… it feels good. 

“Katya, where are you, right now,” he’s still out of breath and it’s quiet in the room he’s migrated to. She doesn’t have the time for this, but she’s getting hard at the sound of his breathing through his nose.

“In the park, asshole,” she’s laughing, and she’s not going to entertain him. He breathes a quick _fuck_ and she thinks that she can hear the ghost of a zipper.

“Hey, how are you,” his voice has dropped a little, he sounds less frantic, more settled, and she loves hearing him like this. In the weeks that they’ve been apart, Katya has been able to catalog all of his different voices over the phone, when he wants her to hear certain things or when he wants to put forth a different emotion, wants Katya to understand how he feels. How he feels about her.

It’s sickeningly romantic and she’s going back-and-forth, forwards and backwards and sideways with her feelings for him and what she wants for them, and sometimes she can’t fucking breathe for how much it’s suffocating her but sometimes she’ll be sitting in the park, smoking, talking to him and she’s never smiled so big and she’s never loved anyone so much.

How could she ever pass him up. He’s the best thing that’s ever happened to her.

“I’ve been better but, I’m talking to you, so, I don’t know if I’ve ever been worse,” she’s laughing full volume on the bench, and the park is deserted. It’s quiet and still like it gets right before a storm. The air is full and silent, the trees are hanging down heavier with darker green leaf undersides. The birds are away and Katya feels sucked into the phone, into Trixie’s laughs and breathing.

“Fuck you,” Trixie is laughing with her and their laughs still sound good together across states and time zones. “Okay, but, seriously, how are you.”

Katya still doesn’t want to get into it. Video chatting is saved for jerking off and Katya stripping out of lingerie on a blurry, pixelated screen and phone calls are reserved for deep thoughts and _i love you_ s and financial discussions and therapy sessions.

“Trix, you know how I’ve been doing,” she sighs. The air is a little warmer and she should probably start the walk back home before the sky opens above her baseball hat.

“But I want to hear you say it,” Trixie isn’t whining, he’s just matter-of-fact with it, and that’s what unsettles her the most. In the time that it took for him to drive back to Milwaukee and the three days he didn’t call her once he’d arrived, he’d somehow gotten more grounded in his unapologetic love for her. 

He’d called her the third day in tears, groveling, begging her to accept his apologies and she’d been in bed for the third day straight. She’d accepted and then had sat quietly in the sheets that still smelled like him, a little, maybe, listening to his voice and letting him spew out far-fetched plans and promises. He was drunk and she had wanted to take him with her on a long vacation where neither Boston nor Milwaukee existed.

“I’m good, I’m okay, Trix,” she’s stood up now, she’s walking back home. She’s flexing her fingers of her left hand. Trixie would always walk on her left side.

“Okay. Because I’m going to move in.” 

Katya stops in her tracks. It’s drizzling lightly now and she can feel the cold rain on the back of her calves.

“Trix-”

“No, fucking listen to me for a second. I’m serious about it now. This is the last time we’ll discuss it. I haven’t gotten any of the jobs I’ve applied for. And who knows if I could get a job in Boston but your apartment is cheap and I’ll be doing shows, I don’t want to overstay my welcome here, either.” Trixie is talking fast, Katya knows he thinks she’s going to interrupt him.

“Okay, Trixie, look,” Katya breathes the damp air slowly in through her nose. She’s walking again. And for the first time, she feels at peace with all of it. She loves Trixie. Who fucking cares at this point. “Do what you need to do, what you think is right, okay. Of course you can live here with me. I love you. I miss you so fucking much. I won’t tell you no.”

Katya is tired of her own wishy-washy behavior. She knows that she’s being obnoxiously indecisive and it’s helping no-one, including herself. It’s in Trixie’s hands now, and there’s nothing she can do about it. She’s just going to let him figure it out for himself. 

And if he doesn’t come, she’s breaking up with him the moment he tells her he’s staying in Milwaukee.

“Okay. Okay, I’ll tell you what I decide.”

“It’s up to you, okay. Whatever you want. I can’t say no to you,” it’s pouring and Katya is just rounding the corner to her block. Trixie is laughing and the phone cuts out a little.

“I can’t say no to you, either, girl,” Trixie’s voice is warm and Katya can feel it pooling in her stomach. She settles down on the couch and watches the rain out the window, against the tree and the low gray sky.

“I love you,” Katya can’t stop saying it. And she’s hanging off the edge of the precipice, Trixie could decide to stay home, and then she’d never see him again. And she has to try to make peace with that.

She knows that she can’t. And that’s okay, because she’s in love with him. And that’s it.

She misses him more, though, now that she’s accepted it. She wants his skin and bones, his eyes. She wants his tongue and she wants him rubbing lotion into the skin of her legs. 

And she lies in bed all day, it’s hot and she still hasn’t turned on the AC. She drives to the store and she performs and she goes to bed and wakes up and it’s another day, again. And it goes over and over, Trixie calling at around 1pm each time. It’s looping and unforgiving, Trixie is further and further away each late morning and each small meal.

```

Katya wakes up in the middle of the night with a gasp, she’s sweating and she instantly forgets her nightmare. It was about Trixie, her dreams always are. It’s been three weeks and that’s not long. It’s not even remotely long.

It’s so deafeningly quiet. She feels like she’s in a coffin until her eyes adjust and she can see the faint glow of the streetlight. 

Trixie’s body isn’t next to her and it’s 3am, she has a show tomorrow so she can sleep all day instead. She unlocks her phone to see two drunken texts from Trixie. They were sent mere minutes ago. The screen is cold to the touch.

 **Trixie:** Hey I lvoe you so mcuh. 

**Trixie:** Wana hold you so bad. Never thight i’d have to tell a guy i’ Have a girlfirend LOL

Katya doesn’t know how much longer her heart can ache. She crawls out of the sheets and limps to the bathroom. Trixie insisted on a night light for the wall when he was there, he’d tripped on the doorway one too many times. He’d bought a Barbie-shaped one, Katya’s had it plugged in since. She wants to smash it into tiny pieces.

Her phone is still in her hand and she sets it on the back of the toilet, she’s watching her own pale eyes in the pink glow, in the mirror. The blue walls look black in the night, looming over her. She can’t stop thinking of Trixie’s stomach under her hands, how it expanded and contracted with quick breaths. If she ever sees him again she wants to get him naked, under her. Not to fuck, but so she can touch him everywhere, so she can feel all of her skin against all of his.

All of his warmth whirling with her own, in the light from the window of her room. She’s gripping the sink, her fingers ache and it feels like her bones might split.

She picks up her phone again and types out a reply. She can’t leave the texts unreplied to, he’s never done that to her and she won’t do it to him.

 **Katya:** You sure I’m pretty enough for you to call me that? lol

Trixie is typing to reply immediately. Katya lowers herself onto the floor, sits curled up against the wall.

 **Trixie:** Shut up. Youre the prettiest woman in the wordl. I’m serious, Katya

Katya’s leg hair is prickling against her chest hair and she’s never felt uglier. She’s naked on the floor and Trixie is typing again.

 **Trixie:** I love you

 **Katya:** I love you too

It’s so late. Katya is so tired, but her eyes are wide open and her mind is going top speed. She pushes her aching body up from the floor and stares into the shower. She could turn it on, shave herself down, put on a nightgown and go to bed. She’d feel instantly better and maybe she then she could give Trixie a decent reply. 

She turns around and goes back to lie in bed. She doesn’t fall asleep until noon the next day.

```

Katya’s drank a half a bottle of wine when it happens.

She’s on the futon that Trixie slept on that first night, that Trixie passed out on, watching House Hunters and she’s drunk, like fucking wasted. She’s about to pass out, probably, she hasn’t drank this much in a long time and she misses Trixie so bad, she can feel it in her unshaven chest and thighs and her shaky hands, her peeling nail polish.

She just wants it all to be fixed, she’s crying a little maybe, and the couple on the show is buying the fucking house of their dreams, they’re so in love and they want to have a baby, and Katya’s holding her hand against her mouth and her stubble and there are fat tears leaking out of her eyes drunkenly, and then the doorbell rings.

She stumbles up, to go to the door and she doesn’t think to check through the peephole, good way to get fucking murdered, she remembers as she’s unhooking and swinging it open.

And… Trixie’s there? 

With a baseball hat on and he looks so tired, Katya’s eyes widen and she sways to the side, Trixie reaches out to grab her and she must look a fucking mess, stubble and she’s still crying, Trixie’s never seen her like this and Katya feels suddenly extremely vulnerable, naked and confused. Off-balance, physically and spiritually.

“Wha-- Trix,” Katya’s head is on Trixie’s shoulder and she’s holding on so tight, her fingernails are digging into Trixie’s back and she thinks that she’s sobbing. Trixie smells like himself but concentrated, heavier from a journey and his sweat and he’s holding Katya just as tightly.

“Shhhh, I’m here,” Katya pulls back and she’s mostly sober, somehow, Trixie’s shocked it all out of her and she tries to pull Trixie to the couch but Trixie won’t budge.

“Katya,” Trixie sounds serious and intense and his deep brown eyes are even more so, Katya is suddenly very nervous and less excited about Trixie being here, is it normal if you’re in a long distance relationship for your boyfriend to come halfway across the country to break up with you? Katya wishes that she knew the rules, or that she’d ever had a single serious relationship before this.

“Yeah?” Katya’s voice sounds small, even to herself, and Trixie is holding both of her hands.

“I’m here. Like, all my stuff is in a van outside,” Trixie is smiling but his eyes are nervous and Katya wants to soothe them with her fingers lightly over his lids and little wrinkles.

“What?” Katya wishes that she understood even a little bit of what Trixie was saying.

“Katya. I’m moving in with you, whether you like it or not,” Trixie is giggling as Katya’s eyes boggle, it’s been a long day and maybe she’s hallucinating this entire thing.

“You’re what?” Katya is squinting, maybe it _is_ a hallucination but Trixie smells real, he was just holding her.

“I’m here for real,” Trixie smiles and then it all snaps to real time and she’s pulling Trixie in for a sloppy, wine-flavored kiss with her purple tongue, Trixie groaning into her mouth, pushing her into the house and settling her gently against the futon, his soft, big hands a contrast with his firm lips, attacking Katya’s bottom lip and stubbly chin and neck. Katya is whining and she’s rock hard, rutting against Trixie’s thick thigh and Trixie’s hands are rough now, pulling her shirt off and pulling her shorts off and Katya isn’t wearing any underwear and Trixie inches down the couch and sucks her dick into his mouth the instant he sees it.

Katya lets out a shout, Trixie’s mouth is hot and it’s been so long, Katya is thrusting upwards involuntarily and Trixie’s hands hold her hips down, Katya is oversensitive and Trixie’s fingers and palms are branding into her skin. 

“Trixie, Trixie, Trixie,” Katya can’t stop repeating, out loud, and Trixie’s hand is moving up her chest to pull on her chest hair and Katya’s never felt that kind of delicious pain before, she’s about to come and Trixie is deepthroating her with his eyes wide open looking up at Katya through short, brown lashes and Katya can see how his pupils are big beneath them and she comes right then, and Trixie swallows it down, every last drop, and Katya’s mouth is wide open in a silent shout.

```

After Trixie’s bags have been brought inside and the sun is coming up over the horizon through the green leaves, cool breeze blowing through the window that Katya propped open to smoke (she’ll quit tomorrow), they’re sitting on the futon and Trixie has Katya’s hand in his, painting her nails carefully.

The futon is still covered in blankets, still soft and off-balance, and it’s been no time. But it’s been years, long stretchy hours.

“You could do this better than me,” he mumbles, smiles up at her.

“Yeah,” she snorts, kisses his forehead, scratching it with her stubble. It’s weird, but it’s Katya, and Trixie accidentally flicks a little red paint up her middle finger.

“Shit,” she’s wheezing, head back against the cushion, and Trixie’s heart is in his throat with her laugh, her limbs, and the cool, heavy air. It’s more humid now that it’s August, and she’s gotten tanner, somehow, but the veins in her pink eyelids are still there and her eyes are the same. It’s been a month but it’s been no time, and he feels older and wiser and different.

Good different, like Katya’s reached inside him and pulled something out, put it on display.

Katya’s shoulders are lighter, she can feel it, and it’s physically unnerving. Her feet are propped atop the coffee table and Trixie had run fingers up her legs a few minutes ago, until she’d pushed his hands off and sent him to work on her manicure.

Trixie’s eyes are on her. He’s looked concerned every moment but for the moments when they were fucking a few hours ago, but he hasn’t thought to ask. Or he’s afraid to. And Katya doesn’t want that.

“I’m okay,” she whispers. He’s holding the cheap red polish in both hands. He gives her a little smile and kisses her again, he hasn’t stopped leaning over into her space to press their lips together quickly since he’d arrived. 

“You were awake when I came,” he whispers against her lips. He’s chewing gum and his breath is minty and cool. He’s been blowing on each nail to dry it faster, taking extra care to not smudge them.

“Yeah, it’s okay,” his hair is so short that she can reach behind his head and press her fingers into his scalp, her still-drying nails short enough to not be in peril. It’s still very windy and Trixie’s body is blocking her from it but she can feel it on the back of her hand.

“You sure?” he’s scooted up so that they’re cuddled next to each other. He’s wearing those same denim cutoffs. Katya can’t help but huff out a laugh into the air in front of his face, slide her other arm around the back of his neck. 

“I’m sure.”

“Okay,” Trixie is smiling, less concerned, his eyes are trusting brown. Katya wants to sleep in them. She pulls his head in again so that their lips are touching.

“I’m gonna shower,” she says against them. Trixie smiles and she kisses his teeth.

“Okay.”

“And then I’ll be back in my new panties I ordered when I was missing you,” Trixie laughs into her mouth, she’s grinning too, and they have more to figure out, _she_ has more to figure out, she has more to choose and think about and more to look at inside herself. But Trixie’s here, and he’ll make coffee for when she’s out of the shower and she’s done sucking his dick in her new lingerie.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> <3


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 7 years later.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love this & I love them, so I hope you love it too. There are 2 little clues in this chapter about how the next chapter is going to go... :)
> 
> He/him is used even when Trixie is in drag to prevent confusion.

Katya is waiting patiently. She’s circling the ice cubes in her empty glass slowly with her straw, sipping the sugary, watery coke when they melt a little more. 

It’s fucking loud in the club, Katya’s never really partied much but for her own drag shows and it’s surreal to be back in an unfamiliar club, drinking soda, alone.

She’s not really alone, Trixie is somewhere stuffed in a back room with the other girls, waiting probably less patiently for the announcement. And Katya is blessedly anonymous, with the crowds gathered around the TVs in the main room.

If she hadn’t met Trixie maybe his fate would be her own, or maybe they’d have met each other on the show, they’d shake clammy hands on the first day and maybe sneak into each other’s rooms to fuck on the second week, they’d make it to the final three together (more likely to 5th and 6th at most, if she’s being realistic) and they’d be the first double win in Drag Race herstory.

But this is her own reality, her own parallel universe, and she’s cool with that.

Trixie is texting her every two minutes, asking if she’s good, if she wants to come backstage, if she thinks that his wig is pinned on tight enough. Every time her phone buzzes she smiles, he’s so fucking anxious and she knows that he’s going to win.

She feels, well, _serene_ about it. It’s hilarious.

She’s agonizingly sober for him, she wants to remember the look on his face clear as day when he’s led onstage to be crowned, and then she wants to remember how happy he is on their 5am flight back to Boston, she’ll buy a coffee at the airport so she can stay up with him and listen to him chatter away.

It’s nearing the end, the other queens are each getting their little moments with Ru and Miss Congeniality is being crowned, soon Trixie will be out center-stage in all his off-color Barbie glory. Katya can’t wait to see him in the HD of the television, she was there, at the taping, but she’s excited to see Trixie up close in the blinding light.

And when he comes out, blonde and smiling, sparkling sequins, Katya can see his eyes flick up the crowd to where she was sitting, and she situates herself so that her feet are planted like cement to the floor.

When Trixie wins it spreads like cool liquid down her throat. Calm seeps into her entire body with her rising grin and the loud cheers and celebration around her barely register. 

Trixie’s worked so hard, is the thing. When Katya was winding down, about to quit, Trixie had just kicked it even harder into gear. He’d worked tirelessly and endlessly until Katya would wake up in the early mornings and pull him back to sit on the rug next to the bed, knead his tense shoulders until he fell asleep against her legs.

He’d written song after song and scrapped more than he kept, he’d gingerly built up his own fanbase before sending in what both him and Katya knew was his best and last audition tape. 

And all of it had paid off, all of the needles in his fingers and all of the sleepless nights, and Katya knows that he still won’t get much rest from now on, but this time he won’t care as much. Because now he can’t complain about how it’s all for nothing.

She cuts through the deafening crowd to sneak to the door they’ll bring him out of to take him onstage, and then it’s opening and Trixie’s tight in her arms, Katya’s lipstick is getting in his wig and her fingers are digging into his sides.

“Katya, I love you!” He’s screaming over the crowd and Katya is laughing, holding his shoulders. They’ll get to kiss later when he’s out of drag and right now she’s willing herself not to get hard as the massive crown sparkles from where he’s holding it above his seven stacked wigs. 

She’s still holding her empty glass, and when Trixie is done thanking the crowd he yanks her backstage by the hand, his tight grip forcing a laugh out of her from deep inside. 

“Katya,” he’s all up in her space in the hallway and they really can’t do this here, like actually, it would be a terrible idea and she’s pushing him towards his dressing room.

“We can’t, but when we get to the hotel I’ll show you a good time,” he’s moaning about it, but his lips are turned up in a grin, his flawless makeup is more cracked with sweat and movement than she’s ever seen it, and she helps him exit his dress and wig, leads him to the shower.

He takes a long look at her before turning under the spray, she’s not going to let him get to her, she won’t shower with him and she’s going to let him wait for them to get back to the hotel. It’s 10pm and they have plenty of time before their flight.

She gets caught up in reading articles on her phone but when she looks up and he’s still inside, water running, thirty minutes later, she has to shift in the uncomfortable chair. She knows what he’s doing and she’s ready to get the fuck back to the hotel. 

This is hotter than the time that he’d grabbed her wrist in her apartment seven years ago, pulled her to face him. She’s delirious with how hard she is imagining him douching as fast he can in the shower, to get ready for her, water dripping down his chest and thick thighs and heavy ass.

She’s clenching the corner of the table, her fingers hurt but it’s distracting her from her dick and that’s all that matters. They’re going to have to grab a cab and she’s going to have to behave herself in the back seat with him, she’s going to have to keep her hands to herself.

She can’t do it, she knows it already and it’s comforting. She’s not going to expect shit from herself. Trixie just won Drag Race and she’d not going to hold herself back for the comfort of others.

When the shower turns off she takes two deep, centering breaths. He comes out dressed, thank God, in black skinny jeans and a denim vest, which she would love to fucking rip the buttons out of, he’s breathing heavily from the hot steam.

He crosses over to her, mumbles _sorry_ and kisses her with his mouth wide open, his hands are on her breasts in her flimsy bra, he’s squeezing her hard nipples through the layers of her dress.

“Trix,” she’s gasping as he pushes her shoulders up against the wall, his eyes are screwed shut and his lips are wet, he’s fucking drooling over her, his big hands feel so good cupping her tits.

“We gotta go,” he’s pulling back with a deep breath. She’s sweaty and sticky, maybe she should have joined him for his shower. But they’re walking out of the back door, Trixie’s clenching her hand tight in his fingers. 

Everything’s a blur, Katya’s vision is stunted in the night from the white light of the dressing room. Trixie’s body is there in the seat next to her and she’s forcing herself to look down at her phone. She can feel his eyes on her and she knows that her lipstick is totally fucked thanks to the dressing room kiss. 

It’s 11:30 when they get to the hotel. Katya’s already packed for the both of them, so the only thing left is Trixie’s bags of drag. That they can pack before they leave at 3. 

Trixie is dead silent as they walk to the elevator. Katya is carrying one of his heavy bags and he has the other two crossed over each shoulder. She’s not drooling over his shoulders, or his giant ass in the faded jeans, except that she really fucking is. She’s rock hard and Trixie is walking on big feet, strong calves, thick thighs, and his ass is massive. She’s going to die.

She thanks the heavens and the earth, especially the earth and the plants and Mother Nature more generally, that she’s wearing a heavy skirt that hides her boner. It would be very out of place in this hotel lobby.

She _knew_ he was going to win and she thought that she was mentally prepared for it. She really fucking did. She just didn’t realize how it would make him _feel_ capable, and then he’d _look_ capable too, she can see his tiny smirk in his reflection on the chrome wall of the elevator. He’s taller than her and broader than her and he’s carrying two of the bags no problem, like, she could too, easily, but it’s the _idea_ of it.

He leaves the elevator first and her dick twitches under her heavy skirt as he reaches out an arm to hold the door open for her. He doesn’t need to, it’s not going to close on it’s own yet. But he does it and her knees almost give out under the weight of her dick and the heat in her stomach.

“This way,” Trixie is turning down the wrong hallway to their room and she can’t even find it within herself to laugh, she’s just fucking eyeing his bulge in his jeans and her phone is buzzing off the hook in the pocket of her skirt. She pulls it out and turns it off despite the incoming call from her mom. 

She can fucking wait, is the thing, Trixie won Drag Race and she’s about to eat that ass, and then fuck it, and then suck his dick, and then run him a fucking bath or whatever the hell he wants.

She has the key out and she unlocks the door to their suite, she’d forked out serious dough for this room, had called the booking people to make sure that they could get it, and it was all worth it for the way Trixie’s jaw had dropped when she’d opened the door the day before.

She’d wanted to slide her dick in his open mouth but she hadn’t. They’d gone to bed early the night before. Well, she had, he’d been too anxious to sleep.

And she knows that her own comforting wouldn’t help at all, that it would be better for him to have her there silent and breathing next to him, warm and constant, instead of wide awake, looking into his eyes.

And he fucking won. Like she told him he would. She drops his bag on the floor and places her purse on the dresser next to the TV. He’s unbuttoning his denim vest and she can see the skin of his stomach.

“Let me do it,” she crosses over to him, unbuttons the last two with shaky fingers. He’s looking down at her, his chest is heaving and he’s biting the inside of his mouth, sometimes she thinks that she’s passed her own oral fixation onto him.

She can’t help but kiss him, dirty and biting, sloppy and slow, like he likes it. He could kiss her for hours but she’s too impatient, she always wants to move on to the the next thing, especially if they’re both hard and rubbing against each other through panties and briefs.

But this time she’s buzzing, delirious with how he smells and how he tastes, like toothpaste and whiskey and skin and teeth. She’ll kiss him for an hour if he wants, but she somehow doesn’t think that he’ll be too keen on slow-moving sex tonight. And she’s more than okay with that.

She’ll make him a coupon for one free, extended makeout session as his present for winning. Along with the house she’s found for them in Los Angeles. But that’s neither here nor there.

Trixie is groaning into her mouth already, thrusting against her hip, and she pushes the vest off of his shoulders. He’s unzipping her dress down the back and trying to pull it down even as her hands are on his ears, on the back of his neck, pushing off his baseball hat and tugging his soft earlobes.

“Katya, come on,” he’s nudging her towards the king-size bed, pulling her arms down so that he can slide her dress off of her shoulders and down them, still kissing her half down her chin with lips and tongue, she’s lifting her ass up off the sheets to push her dress down, kicking it off along with her heels. 

His hands are all over her, unhooking her bra and pinching her nipples and scraping up her stomach so she shivers, and she unbuttons his pants, pushes them down so he’s naked, disconnects their lips to twirl him around, pull him down on the bed. 

He moans with the manhandling, and she takes his pants off from where they’re pooled at his ankles, throws them to the side with his briefs.

“Take your panties off,” he’s pulling her face back to him to kiss her and she allows it as she pulls the purple lace off, leaving them on the ground next to the bed and climbing up next to him, pulling him by the hand up to the pillows. 

“I’ve never wanted to fuck you more,” Katya blurts out, into the skin of his neck. He’s laughing at her, she’s giggling too but she’s dead fucking serious. She pulls back to look into his eyes.

His smile drops as his eyes scan her face and stop at her mouth, trail down to her perky tits. She props herself up on her elbows, nose brushing against his, lips almost touching.

“What do you want first, superstar?” Trixie laughs a long wheeze of air. He tries to lean the inch forward so their lips will touch but she places her hands on his cheeks, gently keeping him against the pillow so he can’t meet them.

“Please,” his dick is digging into her inner hip, and she shifts a little so that she can grind her own against it. He’s whining and thrusting up against her as much as he can.

“Tell me what you want,” Katya whispers against his cheek, presses a tiny kiss to his skin that’s growing damp with sweat already. “You win, you get what you want.”

She’s laughing, they’re still grinding against each other. She could lie here on top of him all night, she’s got time and she’s got patience rolling out in front of her like a red carpet.

He’s still moaning softly and she pinches his side a little.

“Katya, please,” she laughs again, delighted, he’s squeezing her ass cheeks and pulling her tighter against him, she’s delighted at how his hard chest feels against her breasts and she’s delighted at how his head is thrown back, eyes closed, lashes fluttering. He wants her so bad and she’s dripping onto his stomach.

“Say it, Brian,” she whispers right into his ear, her hair falling over his face. He moans outright at the demand and brings his hands up to dig fingers into her back. The room is silent but for their breathing, but for the sheets rustling beneath them. 

“Stop teasing me,” he’s bringing it upon himself and they both know it, sometimes Trixie will whine at her all day, complaining about anything and everything, until she tells him to shut up and fucks him into the mattress until she says he can come. 

“I’ll stop when you tell me what you want,” she’s lifting her torso off of his to put her hand in it’s place, walking two fingers down the middle of his chest, stomach, to stop them right below his belly button.

“Katya…” 

“Come on,” she connects their lips and brings her hand off his stomach to pull on his earlobe.

“Fuck me,” he’s whining into her teeth. She grins and falls down on top of him again, making him grunt out air. She reaches to the side table for the lube and Trixie’s hands are running up and down her back.

She’s wound-up, stretched out tight, she slides her entire body down Trixie’s, the friction of it burning her skin and pulling where they’re sweaty. She kisses him twice right where his pubes start and rubs her cheek against his dick, he can’t control his hips from thrusting up to her. 

She takes his hips in her hands and yanks them down so that his head is resting on the pillow and not against the headboard. 

“How was your shower, babe?” Katya’s leering over him, she likes to make him squirm and whine and she likes how his hips shift against the sheets.

“Shut the fuck up,” he’s gritting his teeth as she’s digging her blunt nails into the soft skin of his hips. There’s a singular bead of sweat down his chest and God, she wants him so bad. He’s twitching and wiggling and she’s so fucking hard.

She’s not going to last very long.

“See, I told you you’d win,” she whispers, her nails are digging into his ass cheeks and she’s ghosting a finger up between them, sinking it deeper as he whines, shifts down. Her wrist is aching from how it’s squished between his body and the sheets.

“Didn’t I tell you,” she’s just barely breathing her words, now, against his pelvis. He’s thrusting up again and she takes her fingers back from his ass to hold his hips down.

“Katya, I,” she grins up at him from where her chin is now resting on his left thigh, almost at his hip but not quite.

“You what. Didn’t I tell you?” She bites the skin of his thigh and pulls back, his leg hair still between her teeth. He hisses and his leg jerks up with her mouth, she lets go, laughing.

“Yeah, you fucking told me, okay!” Trixie yelps. Katya wheezes and grabs his hips, flips him on his stomach no problem. He groans with it, turns his head to the side so that he can look back at her.

“Good,” she yanks his thighs apart unceremoniously, he’s thrusting into the sheets gently and she grabs the lube from over across the sheets.

She squirts some onto her fingers and reaches her palms to open his cheeks. His hole is twitching with it, the cool air and Katya’s breath against it, and fuck she wants her tongue in there but she’ll wait, he wants to get fucked and she’s going to give him what he wants.

She presses a smacking kiss to it, though, runs her tongue across the warm flesh just once, and the moan he gives is shocked out of him, pushing back onto her face.

“Not yet,” Katya says, pulling her head back. 

She fingers him agonizingly slowly. He’s pushing back against her but she finds a rhythm so that when he pushed back she pulls back, she wants him open wide for her, desperate and loose and ready.

He’s circling his hips, letting out tiny whines and gasps, like he’s in a trance with it. Katya presses hot kisses across his back, over his ass, down his thighs, she can feel the warm skin twitch beneath her lips. And when her fingers first graze his prostate he lets out a long groan, he’s so fucking loud, she’s so hard over it. 

“Turn over,” Katya wants her lips on his when she enters him, and she lubes herself up as he’s pushing himself up on his elbows, flopping to his back. His eyes are dark and he’s scanning all up and down her body, staring at her.

He licks his lips and if she wasn’t dripping all over the place, eyes crossing with it, she’d maybe laugh at him. But he thinks she’s so hot, and it’s the hottest thing she’s ever seen, him looking her up and down.

She sinks into him halfway, and she has to stop, she needs to gather herself but he’s bearing down onto her, so that they’re both whining, she leans against him and they’re breathing into each other’s mouths, lips bumping. 

Trixie’s drooling a little and she licks around his mouth messily, she’s so close that she can discern his brown irises from his massive pupils. He leans forward as she pushes the rest of the way inside him, connects their lips as she starts thrusting into him.

He’s so warm, so tight and it’s ridiculous, she wants to laugh for how turned on they both are, she keeps biting his cheek on accident from the rocking of the bed and her own body. He’s whining almost uninterrupted, but for when he stops to take a breath, and her hair is in his eyes, she blows across his forehead to sweep it off with cool air.

“Katya,” he’s moaning with the wind on his face and her dick so hard in his ass, bumping up against his prostate relentlessly, and then her heart is pounding five times faster because she’s remembering how he won, she brings her hand to finally, finally touch him, jerk him off-beat with her thrusts.

“I’m, I’m fucking. I’m fucking America’s Next Drag Superstar,” she laughs into his mouth, and then she’s coming inside him, pumping him faster and the title is sending him over the edge too.

```

She tells him on the plane.

They’ve traded seats with three separate people so they can sit together, covered in Trixie’s pink fuzzy blanket. Trixie is holding her hand, stroking up and down where the space between her thumb and pointer finger is dry and cracking.

“Hey, guess what,” it’s truly a good morning even though they’re both exhausted from the party and fucking all night, both running on an hour of sleep, but they got through security with less problems than they usually do and Katya’s pat-down went okay for once.

“Yeah?” Trixie is looking out the window, he’s gotten used to flying in the past six months with Drag Race and the shows he’s been booked for. He can sleep at the airport and on the flight and Katya can’t, really, but she’s content to let him rest his head on her shoulder.

“I found our house,” she pulls up the picture on her phone as he whips his head around to look at her, mouth agape.

“What? Show me,” he grabs for her phone and she hands it over, laughing.

They’ve been planning to move to LA ever since Trixie had come home to Boston in at least top four. Katya had pulled him tight into her arms, she’d known that he must have made it all the way for how long he’d been gone.

She was so fucking proud of him, all of his hard work had paid off, and when he’d rattled off the list of challenges he’d won to her she knew that he’d go all the way, win the entire thing.

So she’d started giving little hints about LA being a good place to let his career take off, she knew that based on his look he’d be a fan favorite and she hoped that they’d put her video message to him in Untucked, she’d cried the whole way through and she was sure that it’d endear him to the fans even more.

And he’d agreed without complaint. She later realized how much the situation had reflected his move to Boston, how worried she’d been about forcing him to uproot his life (what life, he always snorts when she brings it up), when he’d been ready for a change anyways.

So he’d allowed her to search houses in LA while he traveled to different viewing parties. She had come to a few, of course, but she was mostly too worried to watch the episodes in a huge crowd, afraid they wouldn’t like her boyfriend or that they’d edit him as the villain.

And they hadn’t, and everyone fucking loved Trixie.

And she’s finally found the house, a spacious but within-budget white ranch that’s got a nice yard and a big master bedroom and two sinks in the master bath. Trixie is exclaiming over how much he loves it, and Katya’s glad that she’s already contacted the owners about a tour and a more-than-likely purchase.

Trixie wants her to decorate it, and she doesn’t mind the idea at all. 

And she’ll be decorating it thinking about how she wants to have a baby with him. He just doesn’t know that, yet.

```

Trixie has been touring the globe for six months now, they’re scheduled to move in two, and he’s been calling her frantically at his every available break, checking that she’s doing alright with the packing.

Obviously she’s doing fine and she does have help, so whenever he calls she has to soothe his nerves with sweeping facetime videos where she shows him the state of the half-packed apartment.

She’s thrown a lot away, as well, to her immense satisfaction.

They’ve only lived here for two years, anyway, there are still unpacked boxes in the closet and in the corner of the spare bedroom. Trixie had kept all of the other boxes they had used for the last move, too, and they’re all conveniently labeled so she has more of a direction.

Trixie’s doing so fucking well. She had gone out to California with him a couple days after the crowning to tour the house and they’d bought it the same day, and Trixie had begged her to fuck him in the hotel bed with the crown on. She’d done it gladly.

His shows are incredible, he’s funny and silly and wonderful and everyone loves him. Katya is filled to the brim with pride for him, and nothing is more wonderful than when their friends tell her how happy they are for him, how proud they are.

Trixie is living his dream and Katya keeps every phone call and text message close to her heart, and while digging in their drag closet trying to pick things that could be thrown out she’d come across that fucking pink wig, the one he’d worn the first time they performed together at Jacques.

She’d laughed in delight over it, but then she was fucking crying about it, on the couch. 

Trixie had been so young, so insecure, they’d both been. They’d fucked in her bed and waited for the car to get fixed, dreading the day that Kata would have to drive him to the fix-it shop so he could pick it up and bring it home.

```

They take the moving van all the way across the entire fucking endless country to migrate all of their shit to Los Angeles.

Katya sweats the whole way through, and the AC breaks halfway through. All Trixie has to say about that is “Thank God for insurance,” and then he lets both windows down, Katya sticks her head out into the dry air.

Trixie takes care to pack plenty of food and they take turns driving the 45 hours, they sleep in two hotels in bigger cities, and they steer clear of truck stops and small diners. It drives Katya insane, but she guesses that he’s right. Plus, she doesn’t want to get fucking murdered before she can fuck Trixie on their new bed.

So they spend a ton of time in the van, sleeping in the seats and eating warm peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and coke for lunch, the sun beating down on them through all three windows.

Katya sometimes forces a stop so that she can stretch, her back aches and they don’t have a bed to sleep on and she’s longing for cigarettes but she hasn’t smoked one in five years. 

She’s not going to start again now, and she knows that teasing Trixie with her body is much more satisfying. 

Trixie will wait patiently, standing against the side of the van as she unrolls her yoga mat on a deserted path at a park or just on the side of the highway, no cars for miles. 

He’ll roll his eyes at her, but they haven’t fucked since the day they left Boston and Trixie is completely opposed to road head so Katya has to take what relief she can get.

She’s halfway convinced herself that jerking off in the passenger seat is a good idea, she just needs to be a little more dehydrated from lack of plastic water bottles to get to that point. She thinks that Trixie might consider that in the same category, although it’s really not technically “road head” it’s likely still distracting and dangerous.

The entire drive is very unreal and unsettling, Katya feels like they’re in a movie, like all of the desert and flat land is a set that could be pulled away at any second. She likes the dust on Trixie’s face, though, how it gets stuck in the crinkles by his eyes.

She knows he’s fulfilling a gay cowboy fantasy on the trip, and it’s cute to watch him take pictures and putter around in antique stores. They buy nightgown after nightgown from ancient women behind creaky wooden counters under the guise that they’re for Katya. 

Trixie wears a woven cowboy hat and buys a shot glass in the shape of a cowboy boot. Katya slides it wrapped in tissues in her purse for safekeeping. 

When they pull up to the house, finally, Katya takes the key out of her purse that’s somewhere by her feet amongst the sea of McDonald’s wrappers and napkins. She’s out of the passenger seat before Trixie can even unbuckle, running up the sidewalk and the steps, unlocking the door with a loud yell.

“Bitch! Rude! You’re supposed to carry me over,” Trixie is yelling from the sidewalk, laughs breaking him off. Katya turns on her heel in the entryway and runs back out, scooping him up under the butt and shoulders, carrying him on shaky legs across the threshold. 

“Welcome home,” she’s screeching, and she drops him onto the hardwood floor, but he pulls her down with him.

“Welcome home,” he whispers into her lips.

```

Katya had been delighted at the his and her sinks in the master bathroom, and it had been a huge selling point for her about the house.

It had driven Trixie insane, in the apartments, how she’d spend hours in front of the mirror, trying out new eyeshadow or plucking her brows and he’d snapped one day, made a bathroom schedule that he’d hung on the mirror that mostly consisted of _Brian has the bathroom when he has to pee and Katya can’t complain!!!!!!!!!!!!!_.

Even though she’s whittled her daily makeup routine down to thirty minutes at most, they can both get ready together and she can swoon at Trixie’s ass as she’s sticking on a lash or blotting a lip.

Trixie’s staring her down in the mirror, so she pops a hip and lets him watch, like he always does, as she goes through her nightly routine of washing her face and plucking her brows, pulling her damp hair up into a tiny ponytail and pinning her bangs back so that she doesn’t sweat as much in the night.

It’s only 9pm, and it’s all her fucking fault that they go to bed this early, since she now teaches morning yoga at 6am every weekday. But she wouldn’t change it for the world, she likes coming home after to Trixie still asleep, crawling into bed with him and letting herself relax for a little before he wakes up.

Trixie’s just adapted to her schedule, like she’s adapted to his. She spends a lot of time waiting for him, or coming home after yoga to an empty bed because he’s halfway across the world, but she loves how happy he sounds when he calls her after a successful show in a country where English isn’t the first language, or when he gets a good review on his album.

A couple years after he’d first moved in, they’d had a silent, collective realization that they would be together for, well, forever, and Trixie had decided to “better himself” for her, in order to be the “perfect boyfriend and perfect potential husband.” 

Katya had laughed for a good fifteen minutes when he’d said it in passing while making her a peanut-butter sandwich in the kitchen. And it had continued on being funny as he’d tried to make her nice, hot meals, pasta and salads and whatever other recipes he’d found from a single Google search and promptly failed at each one. 

But then, suddenly, he’d gotten good at it. And he’d gotten cocky, too, baking hundreds of cookies late into the night when Katya was fast asleep so that she’d wake up to tupperware containers full of them stacked in the fridge, clearly labeled _FOR WORK, DO NOT EAT!_. 

What the fuck kind of drag shows was Trixie doing that he needed to fucking pass out cookies to the other queens backstage and not save a single one for his girlfriend, Katya wanted to know. 

That’s when she stopped sitting in the audience for his shows and started coming backstage every once in a while, even performing one song with him like once a year. She’d eat Trixie’s buttery cookies and chatter with the other Boston queens, just sit and talk and have a nice time. And then she’d help Trixie carry all his bags to and from the shows, drive him home if he was drunk.

When they moved to LA she stops performing for good, but she hasn’t stopped tagging along to all of his shows in California. They’ve made a close group with the other LA queens and Katya is close with all of them. When Trixie leaves she’ll go to their shows, go to brunch with them. 

She’s more comfortable in public, more comfortable in her own skin, and yeah, her breasts and hormones help with that but moving helped with that too, and yoga, and her art. And Trixie, how he’s somehow the most unwavering, supportive person she’s ever met. He loves her unconditionally and it’s overwhelming, sometimes, but it’s mostly so, so good.

```

Trixie feels fucking amazing as Trixie, now.

He’s on a fucking roll, his shows keep getting bigger and bigger, his album is still selling, and his follower counts keep rising.

If someone would have told him at 24 that he’d have a long-term girlfriend by 32, along with a successful drag career where he could combine comedy, music, and looks all in one, he would have laughed in their face. Probably spat in their face, too.

But it’s all true and it’s all real. And Katya is real, too. She’s too real, sometimes, when his heart clenches when she climbs into bed with him as quietly as she can, so as to not wake him up, forgetting that she slams the door behind her everytime she enters the house. 

She’s too real when he’s waiting to meet her for a date at a restaurant and she comes in in a knee-length dress with pockets on the sides, her purse crossing between her tits and her platform jellies clacking against the hardwood floor, sunglasses on top of her head, pulling little pieces of her bangs up with them.

She’ll spit her gum into a napkin, clasp her sweaty water glass with poorly-manicured fingers, sip through the straw with plump red lips, and he’ll shift in his seat, glare at her when she smirks at him.

The instant they’d moved to California she’d gotten a deep tan (she’d burned first and whined about it until he sat her down on the couch and slid aloe across her back and shoulders and chest), and she’d chopped her hair right above the shoulders, dyed it honey-blonde. 

She has an endless collection of t-shirt dresses, but her favorite is a denim one with embroidered flowers on the short sleeves and the pockets. He’d found it for her while thrift-shopping for nightgowns, and when he’d brought it home she gasped and threw it in the wash, lifted him to sit atop the washing machine as it vibrated and jerked him off, kissing him languidly all the way through.

Sometimes she’ll slap his ass if he’s babying her, he’s never really gotten past consistently grilling her, asking if she’s okay over the phone, especially after Drag Race and the instant, overwhelming changes in finances and travel that had followed. He’s so proud of it, of course, but sometimes he wishes that he was just a fan favorite instead of a winner, maybe his life would be less chaotic and less fucking exhausting. 

Katya swears up and down that it wouldn’t be, and she’ll go on and on in the middle of the night in the bedroom as he’s getting ready for bed, whirling philosophical diatribes about if Trixie hadn’t won, where she thinks he would be, where _they_ would be, and it no longer gives him headaches. It just lulls him to sleep, now.

She’s obsessed with him, and even more so now that he’s at the gym every day. She’s still obsessed with eating his ass, and she would fuck him every single day if she could. 

He’s obsessed with her too, her long, veiny fingers and her new tan, how she lies topless in the backyard, sweat dripping down her breasts and pooling in her bellybutton.

He tries to ask her to marry him and it does not go over well.

And he does care, but he doesn’t, really. As long as she loves him like she does, honest and real and growing, he’s okay with whatever she wants. And realizing that is freeing, he loves her too much to put weight on marriage. 

He still wants it, though.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “How was the show?” She yawns, crossing her long fingers over on the wheel as she turns. Her veins go from her knuckles up to the insides and tops of her wrists, her fingers are white from the cold and her red polish stands out dark against her pale skin.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bonus chapter!!!!!!!
> 
> Mostly smut, some fluff. I've written a lot for this fic that I haven't posted, and some of that will never be posted but some of that is this chapter! I hope you like this as much as I do, have some cute Trixya moments. There's no specific timeline for these, but they are placed chronologically starting in about 2011 and ending in 2017!
> 
> Cheers to UNHhhh for inventing the scene with Katya picking Trixie up from his show & props to everyone who asked for Katya's Untucked video for Trixie!!!!! <3 <3
> 
> They're a team and I love them.

Katya has always had nice tits.

From the first weeks they’d started growing and how she’d lie back against the pillows and let Trixie squeeze the tender flesh gently, run fingertips over her nipples lightly.

They were so tender and her legs and arms would twitch, her dick would drip untouched on her stomach, and she’d come with her hands gripping the sheets, between white fingers. Trixie’s hands would be on her tiny breasts, she’d come without a finger on her dick and she’d come with a drawn-out moan, mouth hanging open. 

Trixie would kiss her breasts open-mouthed, nip at them so she’d whine quietly, muffled behind her elbow or her arm thrown over her eyes. He’d suck on her nipples with his hot mouth, blow on them when they were still damp with his spit so she’d gasp from the cold, curl her toes.

Trixie waits patiently for them to desensitize a little to bite her nipples properly but when they do he bites them until she’s crying and thrusting up against his stomach, tears running leftover mascara down her soft cheeks.

Her stomach clenches and twitches, he likes to splay his fingers across her belly button, feel her shaking abs, how her sweat and his sweat mingle as their pores touch.

She gets so vocal in bed, before she’d started her hormones she’d grunted and given long moans that made Trixie’s dick jump and his stomach sweep up. And when she starts filling out, her cheeks warming and her shoulders rounding and her skin glowing she tenses up less and less, and she lets out long, suffering sighs and tiny whines, she’ll grab his fingers in hers and gasp as he rides her.

She likes him to hold her tits, when he’s on top of her and she’s deep inside him. She likes him to pinch her pink nipples until they puff up from the irritation, until tears leak out of her eyes and she almost slaps him with how quickly her fingers go to his cheek, her thumb pressing into the skin hard under his jaw, where his sweat is dripping down his neck.

She pulls him down and he pinches harder, rolls them between two fingers so she pushes her chest up into his hands, lifts her torso off the bed, the sheets sticking to her sweaty back.

She kisses him nasty and slow as he’s shifting up and down on aching, stinging thighs. Their teeth clack against each other, the bones-on-bones making him shiver and clench around her.

She moves her hand from his thigh, his fingers digging into the soft skin of her chest, he can fit one breast in each hand so well and they’re so warm, pliable and squishy, he can feel her heartbeat and her tongue is stuffed and folded rubbing against his. He’s drooling and both of their lips are so swollen, he’s losing feeling in them and she tastes like spit and skin and spearmint gum.

He’s going to come untouched from all of it, he can feel it building inside him as she keeps grazing his prostate and he lets go of her nipples, kneads his fingers into the damp skin around them, digging his pinkies into her ribs.

The noises are what kill him. 

The new tiny moans and the high gasps when he takes her dick between his lips. The way she hums when her tongue is deep inside him, her blunt nails digging into his cheeks. 

And she whines so high into his ear as he gathers up the last of his strength to clench and bounce up and down just a little faster.

She’s trailing her hand up his thigh and around his hip, to his right ass cheek. She reaches it around, patters clever fingers to where he’s stretched around her, pushes down on the tight ring of flesh so he groans into her mouth and brings his fingers back to her swollen nipples, stopping her breathy, toothy laugh with hard squeezes.

She fucking _shrieks_ , thrusts her hips up into him hard, and then she pushes a finger in him alongside her dick, wiggles it around cheekily so that he moans into the side of her mouth and comes almost instantly, bringing his hands to her waist and pulling her hard against him in reflex.

Her breasts are soft against his hard chest and his lips are on her tiny chin, he’s clenching so tight around her.

She comes with a high whimper that makes his dick ache and pulls out, dripping out of him, and he leans down to kiss her right nipple so softly that she sobs.

```

Her body temperature gets off-balance. She keeps her hair cropped right under her earlobes and it curls inwards, it’s thick and she grows bangs that lie uneven past her eyebrows.

It’s surprisingly chic and careless, Trixie loves it and he loves how she runs her hands through it, mussing it up so that the thick strands morph and stand in opposite directions. She’s always liked him pulling on her hair and now that it’s longer she likes it even more.

It’s the middle of July and she’s exhausted from yoga, she passes out in bed at 7, the windows shut tight and the covers pulled up to her nose.

Her alarm is set for 1:30am, when she’ll have to drag herself out of bed and to the club to pick Trixie up. She doesn’t mind and she’d rather just get up and drive the ten minutes instead of him spending money on a taxi.

She likes it, to see him after his shows, sweaty and tired. She likes how sometimes he’ll fall asleep with his soft lips hanging open against the window of the car, leaving a mark from his lipstick or his chapstick, depending if he’s had the energy to shower.

Her alarm is blaring, then, and it comes to her in a dream she can’t remember once the sound registers.

“Gross,” it’s pitch black in the room and outside the open door in the apartment. She’s fucking _freezing_ , and her nipples are rock hard and rubbing painfully against her shirt.

She pulls on a thick, fuzzy green sweater, pulls half her hair back in a hairband that she finds from rummaging around in the dark on the dresser. She pulls on her warmest socks and sweatpants, she’s still fucking cold so she wraps a fleece scarf around her neck and picks up her phone, license, and keys on the way out.

“Fuck!” A cool breeze hits her the second she’s out on the sidewalk, she wraps her arms around herself and remembers with relief that she’s left a wool jacket in the backseat for this exact reason. She _knows_ that it’s humid, is the thing, but she’s fucking cold. 

She should have worn a bra, one of the nice ones with padding so that her nipples would be encased in smooth soft fabric and not fucking rubbing against her cotton shirt. Trixie always tells her to wear one but sometimes she just fucking likes how tiny and perky they are without one. And she’s not going to wear a bra to bed, so.

She bites her bottom lip as she climbs into the backseat to get the jacket. She wraps it around her shoulders in the dim orange of the streetlight, slams the door behind her and sits in the front seat, turns the car on and takes a deep, centering breath before cranking the AC full blast, like Trixie needs it after a show.

She fucking hates it but she’s not about to complain, he’s always so sweaty and hot and uncomfortable right after a show and she just wants him to be able to sit in the cool breeze, so she covers up in jackets and sweaters. It’s just for like ten minutes, she’ll be fine.

As she’s pulling up outside she presses send on her already-written text, informing him to please exit the building so they can get the fuck home, and sure enough he’s out the back door in seconds.

```

Trixie’s phone buzzes and he immediately pushes the door open to the heat. It’s been a long show and it’s so relieving to see the car outside just feet away.

Katya is in the front seat, he can see that she’s all bundled up and he rolls his eyes a little, but she’s cute. Like, really cute. She just drowns in his old wool jacket, her fleece scarf. The windows are shut tight and she has the AC on for him.

He chucks his bag in the trunk and sets his guitar in alongside it gently, slams it shut with aching arms and walks around the car to the passenger side. He opens the door quickly to not let the cool air out, throws his body down on the seat and slams the door shut behind him.

“Hey babe,” Katya looks very Pacific Northwest chic, the green coat and the checkered scarf, half her hair in a high, messy bun on top of her head. Some strands of her bangs are sticking straight up and her eyebrows are bent every which way.

She looks cute as fuck, cozy and cold, he wants to kiss her but his makeup is irritating his face. She pulls out of her spot and sets off on the way back home.

Her teeth are chattering a little bit, and he’s still sweaty and hot, but the cool air blasting in his face is helping a little bit. His hair is buzzed but it’s not helping because he can feel sweat dripping down his scalp in little rivulets.

“How was the show?” She yawns, crossing her long fingers over on the wheel as she turns. Her veins go from her knuckles up to the insides and tops of her wrists, her fingers are white from the cold and her red polish stands out dark against her pale skin.

“Good! People liked the songs, too,” Trixie catches her yawn. He digs around in the glove box for a tissue to wipe his lipstick off and then she’s holding one out in front of his face, eyes still on the road. It must have been in her jacket pocket, she’s left her purse at home.

“That’s great,” he looks over and she’s smiling serenely, her round chin is wobbling from how her teeth are chattering but her eyes are sparkling.

Trixie lets the rest of the ride pass in silence and he follows her inside the apartment, her penny loafers clicking against the main floor of the building and up the stairs in front of him. She looks very 90’s in her greens and reds and thick socks, her hairdo, and he wants to suck on her fingers because she’s got them gripping the wide sleeves of the jacket.

She unlocks the door and crosses the living room, dropping her shoes with a bounce on the mat. She flicks on the light next to the couch and takes the jacket off with a full-body shudder, leaving it in a heap on the couch. She disappears into the bathroom where he can hear her pee and she’s out in minutes, crossing back over to him with slippery socks on the hardwood floor.

“Goodnight,” she kisses him on the side of the mouth where his foundation and lipstick have been rubbed off. He pulls her in for a tight hug even though he’s sweaty and gross, and she hugs back for a second.

“Thanks for picking me up,” she kisses him again and pinches his earlobe, lets him pull off her scarf and then turns to go to bed, leaving him in the quiet, just the sound of the bed creaking with her body behind the wall.

```

Filming takes fucking forever.

Trixie knew this in theory, before coming. But in reality it’s oh so much worse, he’s not a very patient person and sitting on an uncomfortable couch for literal hours waiting for the judges to deliberate is not his idea of a good time.

He’s made it to the top 5 and won three main challenges already. It’s enough to get his hopes up, but still not enough to convince him that he can relax just yet. 

It’s going so fast but it’s also going agonizingly slow, days are long and nights are short, and weekends are painfully boring. Trixie is trying with all of his might to not think of Katya beyond masturbation fantasies, she’d told him many times before he left that missing her too much would screw his chances in the ass.

And she was right, but that doesn’t mean that he isn’t thinking about her.

He hopes that she’s doing okay. He’s been gone for almost three weeks, and he can’t imagine how it would feel waiting for _her_ for that long, no contact. 

He has been, but he’s been busy as hell, there haven’t been many moments to himself throughout the whole thing. So he’ll think about her before falling asleep, or whenever someone comes down the runway in a terrible look that she’d love.

It’s honestly insane that Trixie and Kim are still in the competition, together. It feels weirdly like he’s coming full-circle, like all the hard work he’s ever done is culminating in this collection of moments. 

It’s hard to not let himself feel off-balance and a little lost, but he’s pushing through quite nicely, he thinks.

It’s been an hour, they’re all chatting about who’ll likely be in the bottom two, and Trixie’s yawning when a crew member calls them all back to the couch. There’s going to be a video, probably, and Trixie isn’t going to get his hopes up.

Katya was adamant about quitting drag for real. And Trixie really didn’t feel the urge to argue with her. He’s fully aware that she has a trillion other, better things to be doing with her time, and he’s happy to spend the rest of his life with her however she chooses to live it.

He’s just been thinking about how her aversion to the show might prevent her from sending him a message. 

He wants one, fuck, he wants one so badly. And he rarely thinks about it until they’re all thrown in front of the TV like this. Then, the moments before they play the message are acute fucking agony, waiting to see if her face will show up on the screen.

And it does. 

His heart jumps high into his throat. He’s dizzy with seeing her, she’s wearing red lips and her hair is a tangled, wavy mess, her black eyeshadow looks even darker and more sultry over the pixelated image. She’s smiling widely and his jaw is wide open.

He wishes she could see him, too, he has a flash of her uploading the video and sending an email, off into cyberspace, hoping that he would see her for a little when she can’t see him. Just off into the black of nothingness, hoping that he’s okay and happy and healthy, just like he’s worrying about her.

“Hi Trixie!” He has her voice memorized and he has the way she says his name memorized, too. “I hope you can see this,” she’s adjusting the laptop screen, and she’s in their living room. She’s wearing a tortiseshell headband and half of her hair is pulled up in a high ponytail. 

“Okay, there.” The screen is tilted so it’s giving her a good angle. Trixie wants to laugh but he’s about to cry, no fucking lie, and Kim is holding his hand.

“Hi Trixie, it’s Katya, I mean. You know that, um. 

“I wanted to say hi, and that I hope that you’re not beating yourself up too much, and that you’re trying your best. Um.” Her voice is wobbly and Trixie wants to die, this is fucked up how he can’t hold her or kiss her and he has to sit here and hope that his makeup won’t be totally ruined by the end of this.

“I love you so much and I miss you so much, I’ve been doing really good but I miss you, don’t come home too soon though, I know that you’re going to win.” Katya has a little black tear dripping down her cheek from her mascara. Trixie wants to kiss it up.

She stops for a moment at takes a deep breath, it’s sunny in Boston and her hair is lit up blonde. Trixie is shivering and cold backstage, and it’s stupid and cliché but he wants to be in her arms so terribly.

“So get the fuck over it and don’t let this fuck you up, I’ll be waiting for you on the couch at home. Dick out. Bye, I love you so much!” She’s full-on crying and she cuts the video off quickly, Trixie’s face is in his hands and he is going to ruin his makeup, all of the other girls are rubbing his back and mumbling to each other but he isn’t listening.

“Trixie, she looked really good!” Kim is whispering into his ear. Yeah, she fucking did, she’s dyed her hair and she was wearing a white tank top with a black bra underneath. 

“Yeah, she did,” he takes his face out of his hands and faces Kim, who looks more concerned than normal. She pulls tissues out of nowhere and starts to blot under his eyes.

“Trixie are you married to her?” Trixie can feel Naomi’s nails digging into his shoulder.

“God, I wish,” he laughs and they all laugh along with him, and he sends a quick thank you up to the ceiling to Katya in Boston for taking her time to do what he’s sure was the last thing she’d want to do, just to make sure he knows she loves him and that she’s doing okay.

```

After he wins and she’s done a residency at the Museum of Contemporary Art, she forks out the dough for implants.

Their financial situation is finally stable enough that he can tell she doesn’t feel guilty about the idea anymore. He’d always told her that she could have done it before if she wanted to, but she’d shut him down instantly every time he’d suggested it. 

He hadn’t pushed it but he’d shift his credit card across the table to her when he’d spy her in the push-up bra section on the Calvin Klein website. She’d roll her eyes but let him pay for them, and he’d still kiss her nipples and the round curves of her breasts in bed, he’d lick across them and bite marks into them so she’d whimper.

He brings her in for the surgery bare-faced, he can tell that she’s nervous as she jokes to him from the passenger seat on the drive there. He holds her hand tight and sings off-key to the radio so that she yells to shut him up, and when she’s lying on the bed at the doctor’s and he turns to wave goodbye at the door she blows him a drugged kiss, gives him a genuine grin with bright teeth.

He’s there when she wakes up, groggy and high.

“Trixie Mattel,” she giggles, taking his hand from where he’s trying to connect their fingers and lifts a heavy arm to put it to her face.

Her hair is back and her cheeks are rosy, warm to the touch. She tries to wink at him but fails, only making her laugh harder.

“Oh!” Her eyes widen comically at the pain from her vibrating lungs and he laughs at her, she looks ridiculous and he needs to take advantage of her vulnerability before she’s an unstoppable force of narcissism with perky D cups.

“Shut up,” she’s closing her eyes and he’ll let her sleep.

“Goodnight, you fucking slut,” Trixie giggles.

“First thing when I get out of here you’re taking me shopping,” she’s drifting off and they both know that she needs to rest more before she can go out shopping or try on bras. Trixie will spend a week with her off work, will run to the store to buy her pickles and ice cream, will sleep next to her without touching so he doesn't hurt her.

He’ll suck her dick with her hands gripping the bedposts so she doesn’t bend upwards and strain her already achey parts and she’ll let him fuck her face in exchange. 

And then he has to leave again for four weeks.

They’ll be all healed by the time he gets back and it’s the unspoken excitement in both of their goodbyes at the airport, especially Katya’s.

She drops him off and kisses him, reminds him to text her when he’s landed. 

Her new tits are heavy and bouncy, she’s wearing bras with extra support for now just to be safe and she’s taken a break from teaching while she assesses her own athletic ability. She’s taking it slowly in the mornings at home right now, and when she’s back to normal and has regained her balance she knows that all the women and gays in her 6am class will gag over her new jugs.

Trixie comes back when she’s completely used to them.

She’d gleefully thrown out all of her old bras, not caring if she should donate them or whatever, we all die anyway and she has new fucking tits and she looks damn good. And she’s bought like twenty new ones already, in every color of the rainbow and in every style.

Trixie is due to arrive in about an hour and she’s wearing a black embroidered miniskirt already, with a red lace thong underneath. She’s been tanning and moisturizing in anticipation, she’s shaved fucking everything and her makeup is flawless, her hair is mostly brushed and she’s just going over her lipstick again.

She wishes she could just go to the airport tits out to welcome him home. 

He’d begged and begged for photos, she knew that he knew that she was taking some serious nudes and he wanted them. He’d asked nicely and he’d sent bouquets to the house with little notes asking for them, and she’d turned him down gleefully every time.

He’s so tan, he’s been in Spain and Italy and the southern U.S. since he’s left and his skin looks like it tastes like outside in every selfie he sends her. He keeps sending her dick pics even though she won’t send him tit pics and she’s well aware that that makes a healthy fucking relationship.

She lets herself admire her tits in the mirror for a full minute, pinches her nipples hard once so that a shiver runs down her spine. Trixie will be here in the bedroom in a couple hours and he’ll fuck her so good and he’ll bite purple marks onto them. Fuck.

She puts on the matching red bra and a low v-cut black top, the curves of her cleavage and the lace of her bra visible. 

She grabs her purse and slings it across her chest, she’s already a little sweaty so the leather sticks to her skin, and she hops in the car to drive to LAX.

She arrives just in time, goes to their usual meeting spot near the front door to avoid her having to see any fans that might recognize him, and doesn’t even take out her phone. She just watches across the white floor and walls waiting for him to come walking towards her.

When she spots him he looks taller like he always does and she’s already half-hard. He sees her and starts pulling his suitcases a little faster to get to her faster. She can see that his eyes are on her chest and she holds her arms out, starts towards him in her clunky black heels.

“Fuck,” he’s breathing and she pulls him in for a quick kiss. He pulls back in record time, staring down at her chest. His eyes are boggling and he’s seen them before but not in all their glory, tan and buoyant in her new bra. She smirks at him.

“Hi. Let me drive you home?” she knows that her voice is low and grumbling, her dick is begging for attention that she’s not going to give until they get home and his big hand is on her waist, fingers splayed down towards her ass.

He pulls her to the door by the hand, she laughs outright and her tits bounce with her steps.

Katya exercises maximum control on the ride home. She holds her breath as Trixie stares down at her tits, then back at the road, then down again, like he can’t keep his eyes off her.

He looks so hot, is the thing. He’s tan and his hands are so nice and his thighs are so strong and it’s fucking her up, her eyes keep losing their focus and then she has to shake her head a little so that she doesn’t drive off the road.

“You look good,” Trixie’s voice is shaky and Katya is about to scream, she wants to roll all the windows down and yell at top volume out at the houses, they’ve made it back to their neighborhood and they’ll be home in a minute but that’s not soon enough.

“I know.”

Trixie’s hand is on her bicep, then, his fingers digging into her skin and muscles, he’s tracing his thumb over a vein. His fingers reach to her right breast and he slides them across the side of it so gently she can’t feel them under the shirt and her bra.

“Trixie,” she whispers, she’s pulling into the driveway and the sun is so bright over the back of the house, it’s blinding her and her sunglasses are pushed back so she can’t see. Trixie is leaning across the armrest, he’s in her space and she can feel his hot breath on her chest.

The minute she turns the car off and the noise from the AC and the engine and the tires stop, she can hear him breathing even louder and the heat from outside starts to sneak in rapidly.

Her eyes are closed but she can hear him shuffling and unbuckling and then his hands are on her tits, squeezing tight, thumbs rubbing where he knows her nipples are beneath the fabric.

“Fuck, Trixie, fuck, the neighbors,” he hums in agreement and keeps going, pulling the seat belt down past her tits, his lips are in the middle of her chest now and she wrenches her eyes open to look down at him, his head bumping up against her chin.

She slams her foot down on the floor when he pinches her bare thigh right where the end of her skirt is bunched up, the whole car shakes with it and it’s the middle of the fucking day, people are probably walking past with their dogs and Katya is so hard it hurts with the thought and with Trixie’s tongue on her hot skin.

His hands are all over her, he’s kneeling on his own seat and his ass is up to the window almost, then he’s pulling back and letting go of her tits so she groans, he’s pulling her hand on his cheek with him as he climbs to the back seat, cowboy boot almost knocking her in the skull.

“This is such a bad idea,” Katya laughs as she unbuckles and follows him, falling to straddle him, his head is resting on the door under the window and it can’t be comfortable but his eyes are all over her, his hands go immediately to where her shirt is tucked into her skirt and he pulls it up and out, she takes it from his hands to pull it off herself.

She kneels up as much as she can, hitting her head on the ceiling to unzip her skirt from the back and fling it to the floor, so she’s just in her lingerie on top of him, her calves are rubbing smooth and moisturized against his hairy thighs. 

His hands are on her tits again, he’s squeezing them so that the underwire is shifting and digging into her skin. Her eyes are crossing with how turned on she is, his eyes are on his hands kneading and his pupils are huge, she can feel his big dick hot against her inner hip.

“They’re perfect,” he whines, and her dick jumps so high that it’s poking out of her thong now, it’s dripping onto her stomach and down the red lace and he drops a hand down her stomach to pull it out, pushes the lace down so that it’s not in the way and he starts pumping slowly.

“Trixie, fuck, I want. I want it off,” she whines impatiently, his fingers are still rubbing through the lace of her bra and the first time his hand is on her dick after he’s been away is always so much, so hot and wet and _good_ and fuck she can hear voices outside and she lets herself fall down on top of him so that they’re maybe less visible.

“Shhhh,” Trixie’s hand has moved off her dick and she’s thrusting against his stomach in his t-shirt, his fingers are digging into the muscles of her back to reach the clasp of her bra, to unhook it.

She lets him pull it off, the voices are still going outside and her dick is aching with it, anyone could see them and she’s almost completely naked in broad daylight and Trixie’s hand is on her ass, pulling her closer to his chest.

He brings both hands up to her tits now, where they’re smashed against his shirt, and she props herself up a little, still grinding against him and his shorts and his thigh and her eyes won’t stay open because he’s pinching her nipples so hard, the pain is so fucking good and somewhere in the near distance a dog barks and Trixie lets go.

“No,” she moans, she has no fucking self control anymore and she’s so turned on that it’s all she can think about, how she wants Trixie’s mouth on her tits immediately, he stills her hips with his strong hands, fingers where her v-line used to be more pronounced but has shifted to more soft, glowing skin.

“You need to be quiet,” he’s whispering against her lips, breaking off a little into a moan as she brings a hand down to rub the heel of her palm across his dick.

Her tits are squashed against his chest and it’s new, they’ve never been so big and his chest has never been so hard against hers, it’s so cramped in the car and it’s fucking hot, she’s sweating all over the place and the sweat is dripping from the tip of her nose onto his cheek.

She kisses him until all of the noises outside stop, and she leans back for a second to pull his shorts down and take his dick in her hand.

“Katya,” she leans forward again, she’s shifted down grinding against his thigh so she can jerk his dick at the same time and so that he won’t touch her but for her breasts. “Come up.”

She lets him grab onto her breasts hard, his fingers digging in tight and she moans outright with it, they don’t fit into his hands anymore and he doesn’t know what to do with them, he’s pinching her nipples and pulling her down by a soft shoulder to take her right nipple into his mouth.

“Oh,” he bites down hard with sharp teeth and her dick twitches against his thigh, she can feel it all the way down her spine and fingers and thighs, how he bites then sucks then bites again, then moves to the left side and does it over, his fingers pinching and squeezing.

She’s about to come, she can’t hold it in and his fingers and mouth at the same time are so clever and overwhelming, she knows that she’s whining and she can’t hold herself up on top of him for much longer because her thighs and back are shaking.

“Brian, Brian, Brian,” she’s babbling, his mouth is on one nipple and his fingers are tight around the other and he moves his other hand down to her butt, pulls the string of her thong tight, twists it in his fingers, digs them so hard into the flesh of her ass that she’ll have bruises there tomorrow, and she comes with a loud yell and a twitch that shakes the car again.

She collapses on top of him, lazily trailing a hand down to his dick to pump it twice before he’s coming, with a gasp into her hair, hands on her shoulders and her ribs and her waist.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I love you too,” Katya’s voice is quiet, like over-the-phone quiet. They’ve both been conditioned to wax poetic over phone calls, to say their most tender _I love you_ ’s when Trixie’s across the globe and it’s 4am wherever Katya is.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> two chapters left! obviously a two-part epilogue wasn't enough for me. this chapter has real, driving plot! which is exciting. this chapter actually contains most of what i originally thought would be a single-chapter epilogue. which, lol.
> 
> featuring real performance artist katya and hot, built trixie as always <3

The house is quiet. Quieter than her old apartment, then their old apartment, and their next apartment.

Ten years don’t pass very quickly when they’re spent in slow moments. They don’t pass very quickly when they’re spent in fast moments, either. She’s known Trixie for forever, and it shows. And it’s all she could ever hope for, all she could ever want.

The silence is broken with a crash from the kitchen, muffled swearing as Trixie yanks open the cupboard to pull out the broom. He probably spilled the coffee grounds again, which isn’t surprising.

She can hear his feet on their way to the bedroom. And she pulls down the sheets in anticipation, so he can crawl back under, touch his hands to her stomach and knees, pull her into him.

“Morning,” he’s in the doorway, smiling at her with two steaming mugs in hand. She reaches out long fingers to pull him to her metaphorically, and he passes the mug into her grip.

He kneels on the mattress, placing his mug on the side table. His watch is there, too. She reaches behind her to place her mug on the matching table opposite. It’s domestic and it makes her stomach tingle. They’ve been living together for ten years. She’s never going to get over it.

“I like you naked,” he’s pulling her against him and she huffs a laugh, her nose is sticking into his chest and her nipples are hard against his stomach. “Come up.”

She trails her nose and tongue up along his chest, he’s tan and strong, he’s obsessed with “taking advantage of living in Los Angeles,” so he’s been going to the gym every fucking morning, he’s built and his ass is even bigger than it ever was when he still had a little baby fat. She’s squeezing it now, he grunts and thrusts against her hipbone.

They’re kissing, and their kissing routine is perfected so that she can get him riled up in seconds, he’s already dripping against her dick and she’s hard against him. Last night he had sucked her off in the shower, big hands on her breasts, squeezing her nipples and kneading the soft flesh so she was whining into the stream, her mouth filling with water.

He knows that his hands all over her drive her insane, sometimes she’ll be standing on the bathmat completely covered in Nair, waiting for her ten-minute timer to go off, and he’ll come up behind her, tickle fingers around her back where her bra straps have made indentations to cup her breasts, heavy and perky, he’ll pinch her sensitive nipples and she’ll moan around where she’s biting her bottom lip, he’ll spin her around carefully to kiss her heavily, fingers on her earlobes and waist.

“The window’s open,” Trixie is whispering into her mouth, and she’s smiling because he _knows_ she likes that, he’s so romantic, even when Katya’s being nasty he wants to kneel in front of her and stroke her dick until she comes in his face. “The neighbors can hear you.”

“They’re used to it,” she laughs at top volume, Trixie’s hands are tight around her biceps.

Later, when Trixie is pulling on still another pair of denim cutoffs (some things never change) and Katya is sliding in earrings that he’d bought her for their 5th anniversary, he puts his hands over her tennis skirt, on her hips. She shooes them off but she lets him kiss her.

He likes to pull on her hair, now that it’s to her shoulders, likes to tangle his fingers in it when she’s sucking his dick, not pulling but just tangling, scratching her scalp.

```

She’s used to separation, now. Trixie is touring and writing and has all these important commitments, and Katya spends half of her time curled up on the couch, eating chips and puttering around on the internet or planning her next piece.

But it’s nice, she’s grown to learn to appreciate his keys turning in the lock and the sound of his taxi pulling up outside even more. 

Two years ago, Katya had had the tiniest mental breakdown. Maybe not so tiny, she’d been waiting for Trixie to come home for three hours, he’d been trapped at his show and his phone had died, and Katya had no idea where he was.

She’d fallen asleep no problem, it wasn’t anything new and she hadn’t done a real show in years but she keenly remembered the multitude of circumstances that could trap you there for hours after your slotted performance time. So she’d brushed her teeth and crawled into bed, had fallen asleep almost immediately. She woke with a start at around 4am, and the sheets next to her were still empty and cold, and the house was still and unbothered.

She called him five times until she realized that his phone must have died, and then she sat on the couch in her pajamas with her phone set in front of her on the coffee table, watching soap operas. She wasn’t taking in a second of them, just staring down the blank screen of her phone until 6:30am when he’d unlocked the door and thrown his bags inside.

She’d pulled him into the bathroom and sat him down on the toilet to wipe off the faded remains of his makeup, and then she’d pulled him into the kitchen to start making breakfast so he could eat something before going back to bed.

“I want to get married,” she’d said to the inside of the refrigerator, and he’d slammed his mug on the table in frustration and exhaustion. 

“You? _You_ want to get married,” he’d sassed back, not realizing that she was being serious. He’d already asked her years before, mere weeks after she’d gotten her new yoga instructor position back in Boston and quit drag for good. She’d laughed in his face, accidentally spilled her ice water all over the tablecloth at the fancy restaurant he’d dragged her to to propose.

She turned around to face him, smiling, crossing her arms over her bra-less tits. “Yeah, Trix, I’m being serious. This time, I really am. I promise,” he’d crossed over and kissed her on the lips, swept her tangled bangs off of her forehead and kissed it, pulled her into him and ran his hands up and down her sides. He’d tasted like he was drunk hours ago, and she’d sent him off to bed after giving him a quick handjob against the counter.

So they did just that, Trixie in a suit and Katya in a red fringe dress that he’d looked up and down before climbing into the passenger seat of their car, rolling his eyes at her black leather gloves and massive clip-in fake flower behind her ear. She’d raised her eyebrows at him to shut him up and he’d gripped her thigh the whole way there. 

Katya had always thought that if she got married it would feel like selling her entire fucking soul away. But it didn’t, marrying Trixie with her mom next to her and their friends around them, in city hall on a Wednesday afternoon. They’d all gone out to eat afterwards and Trixie had held her hand the entire time, so he could feel her ring against his fingers. 

They taken the entire week off work, and Trixie hadn’t even grown impatient to leave the apartment, he’d fucked her in the mornings and at night and in the middle of the day, during lunch. 

Katya had laughed at him, for how he’d be sitting, staring at her with heavy lids as she’d walk back into the bedroom after showering, how he’d stalk over to her and unwrap her towel from her chest and whisper into her skin about how she’s his wife, but soon enough she was talking about her husband to anyone and everyone, how good he is and how annoying he is and how much she wants to throttle him.

```

Trixie’s been worrying about asking Katya about a baby for months.

He wants one, he wants a daughter so badly, and he knows that Katya would be the best mother in the entire world. Of course he’s biased, but she’s such a good teacher, so patient and willing to describe and explain, so gentle and excitable.

He keeps having dreams of her teaching a tiny girl yoga, on matching green yoga mats in the living room, the coffee table pushed out of the way so that they can be lined up next to each other. He can’t stop imagining Katya holding a tiny baby, wrapped up in blankets, cooing and giggling to her as she yawns. And, somehow even worse, he keeps dreaming of waking up in the middle of the night to the baby crying, to Katya grunting and stumbling to the nursery to rock her back to sleep.

It’s taking a lot out of him, the wishing and the imagining. He’s going to have to ask her, but he’s too afraid for the inevitable “no.”

The thing is, he’s always wanted a family. Even a little one, he’d be more than fine with just one kid. And when he was younger, when he just started dating Katya, that dream was pushed into the back of his mind. He’d been having too much fun living with her, smoking weed and drinking white wine late into the night, helping her pick out her next addition to her lingerie collection in a smoky, dim room.

And he’d certainly not thought of kids when his drag career had hit the ground running with the finale of drag race, when Katya had spent the next six months packing up the house to move them to LA as he was flying to a new foreign city every night, exhausted with barely enough energy to shoot her a text.

But now that it’s all calmed down, now that they’re settled in LA and now that Katya’s figured out her optimal job situation, Trixie can’t help his mind from meandering to how easily they could fit a daughter into their lives.

He’s home more now, they have more savings now that he has revenue coming in from album sales, tips, and ticket prices, and Katya’s done three residencies at museums in LA that she’d sent the income from directly into their shared savings account. And he’s ready to be done touring.

They could do it, easily, and that’s what’s gotten him so worked up lately.

Katya is fucking clueless. He knows that she’d never think about this in a million years, well, maybe she would, but only to joke about it. And he’s terrified to ask her flat out because she’s not the type of person to have thought about it at such a length that Trixie has.

So he starts giving tiny little hints. Lots of his friends have babies or toddlers and he starts grilling them about parenting, when Katya isn’t around. Amy keeps insisting that Katya would love a baby, a little girl to mold into her own image, a little person to teach and love and help grow. But Trixie isn’t so sure.

And then, he takes a huge risk by babysitting his friend Julie’s four-year-old girl for an entire day. 

She has a doctor’s appointment, and then she has to run errands, she’s pregnant with her second child and Trixie has been bothering her for the chance for weeks. And when she calls him, he cancels his show the night of and says that he has the day free.

When he tells Katya about it she smiles softly and says _okay_ , and Trixie is worried that she’s being condescending, allowing him to bring a strange child into their house because she knows that he’s been thinking about a baby but she’d never let him have one, so she’ll allow him this one thing, babysitting his friend’s kids until they get too old to need a babysitter and he gets too old to raise his own.

But he brings her over anyway, and Katya takes to her immediately. 

Trixie is sitting with her in the kitchen when Katya comes in from yoga, just showered in cutoff sweatpants and a red tank top, no bra. She looks good, but Vera is sitting at the table with crayons, teaching Trixie how to color outside of the lines properly in her Barbie Princess coloring book.

Katya takes one look at her and Trixie watches her eyes light up, at her tiny red tutu and her pink sequined top, her miniature crown that’s situated off-balance atop her dark curls.

“Hello,” Vera’s looked up and her bright blue eyes are on Katya, and Katya is smiling right back at her. It’s the stuff of Trixie’s dreams. God, he needs a baby.

“Well hello Vera,” Katya shifts her mat, towel, and bag into her left hand, walks over to them holding out her right for Vera to take. And Vera places her tiny hand in Katya’s, shakes it solemnly.

“Are you Brian’s girlfriend?” Katya’s eyes are sparkling green. Trixie is completely enchanted, his mouth is dry and he’s overwhelmed. He can feel his heart swooping up into his throat.

“I’m his wife,” she smiles, holds out her left hand so that Vera can touch her wedding ring, and she _oooh_ ’s at how it shines silver in the light of the chandelier. It’s a cloudy morning but Trixie doesn’t even notice.

“Hi Brian’s wife. You’re pretty. Would you like to color?” Vera is already disenchanted with the conversation, picking up her blue crayon, and Katya nods, smiling softly down at her.

“I would love to. Just let me get dressed. I’ll be right back!” She calls, halfway into the bedroom. Trixie somehow manages to pull his eyes from where she’s disappeared in the doorway, her hair stuck up in two tiny half-buns, and pick up his own crayon.

Katya comes back and she’s in a ridiculous dress that she’d appliqueéd tiny mirrors and pom-poms onto, with red sleeves and multiple fabrics. Vera looks up at her and her eyes widen as she takes in all of the colors and shiny parts, Trixie scoffs at Katya’s blatant showboating. She ignores him.

“I like your dress,” Vera is staring openly at Katya, her eyes traveling up and down the fabric. Katya scoots her chair next to Vera’s, she’s let her hair down and it’s a little kinky from the buns, she pulls it behind her ear. She’s wearing red pom-poms for earrings.

“Thank you so much! I made it,” Katya is digging in the crayon box with her chipped nails, frowning a little as she tries to find her crayon of choice. Vera reaches out a tiny hand to bring the box closer to Katya, who whispers a little _thank you!_ to her, pulls out a peach crayon.

“You made it? How’d you make it?” Vera has dropped her own crayon in helping Katya find hers, and now she has a hand on Katya’s forearm, pulling it towards her so that she can see the dress better. Katya turns so that she can see it full-on, and Trixie keeps coloring, but he’s watching them out of the corner of his eye. 

Katya shows Vera all of the different fabrics she’d used, explains them each carefully, seriously, calling them _thingy_ ’s and _doodly-bob_ ’s. Vera watches with big blue eyes, nodding and gasping as Katya describes how her fingers would get stuck to the fabric with hot glue or how she works a sewing machine. 

She lets Vera find her own face in all the tiny mirrors, lets her touch all the pom-poms. At some point, Trixie gets up to make Vera’s lunch, and Katya sits with her, drawing big shapes all around the Barbies, letting Vera fill them in with different colors. 

They don’t even realize that he’s gone, and when he comes back with Vera’s water and sandwich, Katya’s pulled out a huge sketchpad and Vera is dictating how she should draw her portrait. Katya is nodding solemnly at Vera’s insistence that she have a bigger crown and that Katya should show her freckles, _’cause her Mama says that they’re like the stars on her face!_. 

Trixie is well and truly fucked, so fucking fucked. 

Vera asks Katya nicely if she could sign the picture and leave her phone number so that her Mama knows that _she’s_ supposed to be her babysitter next time. And Trixie fucking agrees with her. He’s hopeless.

They take Vera on her first bus ride to the Science Center and Katya helps her learn about the human brain, which she jokingly calls “The Human Brian,” and Vera pokes Trixie in the cheek, laughing at him for it. 

He feels like a fucking fool, Vera’s right. He’s died and gone simultaneously to heaven and to hell, Katya is holding Vera’s hand and leading her gently from display to display. Trixie gives a little hum of insecurity when Katya is about to bring her into the set of displays on the human body, but she scoffs and rolls her eyes at him.

“Humans are cool, right Vera?” And Vera is nodding along, still holding Katya’s hand tight. She’s been bouncing up and down on her tiny pink sneakers, and Trixie realizes with a squeeze of his heart that she really must look like their daughter.

Vera is stuck on veins, she’s standing in front of the plastic model of vein pathways in the human male, and Katya slides away to stand next to him, kiss his cheek.

“You having fun?” He’s sure that he’s blushing and that her purple lipstick is smeared on his red cheek, now.

“Yeah,” he smiles back at her, tries to scream at her with his eyes that he wants this, that he wants this so fucking badly. And then she turns back to take Vera’s hand again, to lead her on so that she can learn about muscles.

There’s an ice cream truck just outside the museum, of fucking course, and Katya and Vera are leading the way to it so Trixie can have a moment to put his hand up to his face, scrub Katya’s lipstick off of his cheek and slap himself as quietly as he can. The sun’s come out from behind the clouds, and it’s a beautiful day. Katya’s hair is glowing in the bright light, she looks like an angel from behind, holding Vera’s hand. Vera is calling to him, asking what kind of ice cream he wants, and he knows that Katya told her that she could ask him because she’s well aware that he likes vanilla.

“I’ll take vanilla, please, thank you Vera,” he’s a little out of breath and Katya creeps her hand around his side to squeeze his ass quickly, so that he yelps.

“Are you okay?” Vera’s turned around to look at him through her tiny pink sunglasses with the reflective lenses and the plastic daisies attached to the bows. He nods the affirmative and when she turns back to talk to the woman in the truck he pinches Katya’s bicep, but all he earns is a long, amused wheeze.

“And this is Human Brian, and his wife Katya, my babysitter,” Vera is introducing them to her new friend, the Russian woman in the ice cream truck. She nods and waves hello, passes each of them their ice cream. Katya shuffles up to pay in her red jellies, and soon enough she’s chatting with the woman in rapid Russian.

“Did you have fun, Vera?” Trixie’s asking her, kneeling down to her level. They’re going to take the train to Trixie’s favorite vegetarian restaurant after this, and he’s hoping that the single scoop cake cone hasn’t spoiled that for her. 

Vera is nodding, licking her cone, and she’s somehow already gotten it all over her fingers and face. Katya is laughing loudly with the ice cream lady, she’s doing that thing where she can talk to anyone about anything, at any time, and still make them laugh. Trixie loves her so fucking much. And Vera is making him love her even more. 

It sometimes hurts, when they’re in a new situation, when Katya is interacting with someone in a way that he’s never seen before, how he falls more and more in love with her. Right now it’s choking him, her moisturized tan calves flexing as she stretches to her tiptoes to kiss the Russian woman on the cheek in farewell. 

Katya lets Vera sit on her lap on the train, and Trixie carries her tiny pink backpack with the fairy wings dutifully. Vera climbs so that she’s standing on Katya’s thighs, peeking out of the window as the city goes by, hands sticking to the dirty window. Trixie tries to tell her not to, but it triggers a Katya Diatribe™ about building up children’s immune systems that he was totally unprepared for. He just stands next to her, nodding along, watching the sky and the clouds and the rails fly by.

At their stop Katya gently lifts Vera from her lap and Trixie’s skin withers a little, he’s aged five years in the time since Katya’s come home from yoga. He feels fully destroyed, mentally, physically, and spiritually. 

Trixie takes Vera’s other hand so that she’s holding both of theirs, and he can’t even fucking look across at them, he knows that it’ll fuck him up even more. God, he wants a kid. Katya needs to be a mom, like, yesterday.

Trixie leads them inside the restaurant, and the host brings them to a table. Vera gets a little plastic seat on top of the battered wood chair so that she’s up at the correct height to be able to converse with them and eat her dinner properly. Trixie looks down at his watch, they have three hours left with her.

Katya passes Vera the kid’s menu and lets her look at it in slight confusion for a little, then she slides her chair around the curve of the table to whisper out the choices she has. Trixie has to focus on not puking up his heart onto the table as he realizes that she’s trying to give Vera the illusion of independence and adulthood by letting her “read” the menu. He wants to die.

“I want the chicken fingers!” Vera exclaims, and Katya giggles a little, takes the menu back from her to set it underneath her own on the table.

“Sounds yummy. You know they aren’t _actual_ chicken, yeah? They’re made of soy,” Katya whisper-yells across the table to her. Trixie snorts. 

“What’s soy?” Vera is yelling, Trixie can’t blame her, it’s loud in the restaurant now that people are lined up out the door for the dinner rush. Katya begins to explain the many wonders of the soybean but is interrupted by their waitress, who looks more than a little frazzled.

“And what can I get you all tonight?” She’s pulling out her pen and notepad, and Trixie gives his order, and Katya gives her own. They all look to Vera but she’s taken off her sunglasses and is fiddling with the daisies on them.

“Can you order for your daughter?” The waitress looks stressed out, Trixie is sure that the hippie parents that frequent this restaurant give their kids plenty of leeway when it comes to so-called “free expression” and “taking their time.” Fuck. What did she just say?

Katya’s mouth has curled up into a wide grin, and she rattles off Vera’s order. The waitress sighs and says she’ll be back soon with Vera’s organic lemonade, and when she leaves Katya lets out a long series of wheezing laughs, and Vera jumps when she slaps the table with the palm of her flailing hand accidentally. 

Trixie’s laughing too, he can’t help it when Katya laughs like that, but he’s also shaken to his fucking core. Why did Katya grin like that when the waitress had assumed Vera was their daughter? He’s losing it. Officially. And Katya is helping Vera fold her recycled napkin into a sailor hat. 

The waitress comes back with the lemonade and now that the line’s shrunk a little she’s less anxious. She smiles at Katya and then at Vera. They don’t really match but she seems to buy it.

“Easy labor? She’s how old, four? My daughter is two, and let me tell you, I have _no_ idea how you’ve made it so far! The terrible two’s are real, and I’m exhausted in more ways than one,” Trixie is barely holding in his laughter and Katya’s neck is flushing, she’s clenching her napkin on the table in mirth, he can see how her eyes are dancing but she’s somehow pulling it together for this hopelessly clueless woman.

“Yeah, pretty easy, honestly, I was just wide open, super dilated. Ya know? And she just,” Katya smacks the table with her open palm. “Plopped out! Practically,” Trixie can’t hold in his snort, but the waitress is laughing too, obviously for drastically different reasons. Vera is blissfully unaware of where the conversation’s gone.

“You are such a funny little family!” The waitress is still laughing and she’s turning away to go to the back.

“They’re not my parents!” Vera yells, Trixie bursts into a loud screech and Katya wheezes, flails and knocks over the lemonade, it spills all across the table and Trixie reaches for the glass, swiping up the spill with his napkin before it can fall onto Vera’s lap. 

He doesn’t notice how Katya’s eyes darken at his gymnastics, but he can feel the shift in her energy as she stands to help him wipe it up, bumping against his side, the hot skin of his bare arms shocking her.

They have a different waitress bring out their food and a second lemonade for Vera, and Trixie’s glad for it. No way could he have looked the first one in the eyes again. 

They take Vera back to their house on the bus, she chatters away about how she’s going to ask her Mama to take her on the bus every day now, much to Katya’s delight. Trixie can’t count how many times he rolls his eyes at Katya’s dialogue about the importance of public transportation and the meaning of a good, _reliable_ transportation system. Vera is loving it, sitting on Katya’s lap again, but when she grabs Trixie’s hand to pull him out the door at their stop he feels weirdly validated.

“Brian, can you help me put away my stuff?” She pulls him into the dining room, her tennis shoes squeaking against the hardwood floors. 

He helps her pack the bag patiently, holds it open for her as she places all the crayons haphazardly back in the box, runs back and forth to place items one-by-one inside. Afterwards, once he’s zipped it up and the table is clear, she runs to him, hugs him tight around the legs. When she lets go, he drops down to his knees beside her, wraps his arms around her. Her arms are tight around his neck and the doorbell rings, they’ve made it just in time for Julie to get there.

Trixie can hear Katya opening the door and greeting her, chattering away about their day, hugging her hello. Trixie lifts Vera and brings her to the door. She presses a tiny kiss to his cheek and Katya resituates her little crown so that it’s sitting straight on her head, boops her on the nose with her pointer finger.

“Bye bye, Vera!” She calls as Vera waves to them from her mother’s arms on the way to the car. Katya closes the door behind them.

“Fuck, that was exhausting. But fun! Has she asked you to babysit before?” Katya has knowing eyes and he doesn’t like it, he’s still unsure if she’s teasing him. 

He’ll ask her tomorrow. But he won’t bring it up tonight, not when he’s still whirling from how Katya had led Vera around at the museum, laughing with her and joking with her. And how it had felt to sit all three of them at the restaurant. Fuck.

“No, just today. We could do it again, though,” he’s pulling her to the bedroom and unzipping her dress down the back, pulling it down her shoulders and helping her pull the shirt up and off. He unhooks her bra and pushes her forward gently. She sits on the bed, pulls off her panties and pulls on boxers and a faded t-shirt.

And they’re standing next to each other in front of the long mirror. He’s watching her swipe her makeup off in practiced strokes, as he brushes his teeth and washes his face. When they’re both finished he walks to her, takes her hips in his hands and holds her, looking into her pale eyes. He kisses her on both cheeks and his heart leaps at her soft skin.

He sighs out through his nose and pulls her into him, so that her arms are around his neck loosely, her elbows bent at his shoulders. His nose is in her hair, and he can feel the warmth radiating off her neck, he kisses up the tiny droplets of water at her hairline from washing her face.

“I love you,” he whispers into her blonde strands, his hand had moved to the back of her head, sliding fingers through her tangles gently.

“I love you too,” Katya’s voice is quiet, like over-the-phone quiet. They’ve both been conditioned to wax poetic over phone calls, to say their most tender _I love you_ ’s when Trixie’s across the globe and it’s 4am wherever Katya is. Sometimes it’s overwhelming how much has changed since they first met, and how much has stayed the same. She’s the same, but different, and so is he. But she still looks at him heinously tenderly, so tenderly that it makes his heart squeeze out blood and arteries.

He lets go, takes her left hand, with her ring between his fingers, leads her to bed with it. He leans over to her and presses his fingers against her left temple, where her soft bangs stop and her hair is longer.

He can feel the weight of his ring around his finger, cool and present. He slides his fingers down to her earlobes, pulling both of her earrings out. He throws them off the edge of the bed and she rolls her eyes at him, huffing a laugh through her nose. He can tell that she’s exhausted from the day and all of the excitement, and Trixie runs a hand across her cheek as her laugh morphs into a yawn.

“Let me?” She nods, lazily stretches her arms out from her chest to the edges of the bed as he shuffles down the mattress, knees in the sheets on either side of her thighs. He’s rarely on top of her like this, and when he is she’s almost always tired, and he loves to see her hair splayed across the pillow, scan his eyes over her body and how it curves with the sheets and pillows.

He sits down on her thighs and she leans up to kiss him but he presses a finger to her half-open lips. She takes it into her mouth cheekily, lets her tongue twist and caress it, so that his pupils widen, so that she can see his dick growing in his boxers.

The sun is just setting, and it’s coming through the blinds to stripe against the wall. Trixie wants to get curtains for the bedroom but Katya is weirdly attached to them. She says that she likes the way they stripe Trixie’s skin. He’s not going to argue with her, she looks pretty in the patterned light, too.

He kisses the tips of her fingers. Then her palms, and starting with her inner left arm kisses all along the soft, pale flesh, kisses her skin open-mouthed and tender, her fingers twitching in his hands, she whines when he kisses her armpits and her collarbone, where it curves down to her shoulder.

Her skin is soft and warm, he can taste the sun in it with his lips and tongue. He’s essentializing her to her body, her skin, how it curves along her bones and how she breathes with all of her pores. How her skin moves and how her muscles twitch when he touches them.

Her lips are open silently, the house is watching them. The house is breathing with them, the wall behind Katya’s head and how it expands to the ceiling, the dead roses Trixie bought her as a housewarming present three years ago dry in the vase next to the pillow.

People have fucked in this room before, and they’re fucking in it now. Trixie has his hands on her biceps, holding them out to either side of her as he kisses her breasts, sucks her nipples and runs his nose across them. She’s shivering, and he lets go of her arms to hold her, press their bodies together as tightly as he can.

He runs bare hands up and down her back, feeling the hills of her muscles and how she’s expanding with breathing. She sometimes stretches before bed on the rug, pulling her arms around behind her head and twisting them, shoulderblades poking out, tendons and veins visible.

She’s gasping shuddering breaths, he can feel them where his ear is almost touching the skin of her stomach. Her heart is beating under his hand and his fingers are pressing into the flesh of her left breast.

“Trixie,” she sighs long, Trixie imagines he can hear the dried rose petals doing the same, fluttering with her eyelashes.

```

Trixie has been dropping sloppy hints left and right. Katya isn’t surprised and she also isn’t going to say no to him when he asks, he just doesn’t know that yet.

She can see his nerves when he’s about to ask her, and he hasn’t been able to suck it up and spit it out yet, which is driving Katya just a little crazy. It all culminated in babysitting Vera yesterday, a phenomenon that has further cemented Katya’s intentions to agree with him. It’s fine though, she’s waiting patiently for him to gather up the courage. She knows that he’s trying to gather strength to stomach being let down, which she feels badly about, but she also knows that she has to let him do it on his own.

Maybe. If he doesn’t ask soon then she’ll just bring it up as she’s fucking into him, or something, just because she can’t help but be a little mischievous about it. He’ll get soft in seconds and she’ll get some kind of perverse thrill from it, pushing his buttons and shocking him into tears. She’s cracking up already just thinking about it.

But last night he’d been so gentle with her in bed, like he’d actually believed that she’d given birth, like he’d actually believed that she was a mother by nature, an earth goddess, and he’d kissed all over her limbs and bones with aching tenderness. She’d almost cried before coming, and all of the other times he’s made love to her have been nothing like it.

And she’d almost said it to him, that she’d have a baby with him. But she knows that he has to ask her, on his own.

And he does ask her. He’s carrying bags and bags of flannels and denim shorts and t-shirts at the mall and Katya is texting Alaska about her new album, Trixie pulling her by the elbow to ensure that she doesn’t walk into a pillar. She looks up from her phone and he looks constipated, his brows are knotted together and his fingers are white, clenching the shopping bags.

“Katya,” he breathes out, extends her name until he doesn’t have any breath left. She wants to laugh at him but she knows it would be needlessly cruel, he’s trying his best and she shouldn’t be laughing at his pain. He does look like he’s trying to take a shit, though.

“Yes?” She’s keeping her voice as soft and… accepting? As she can, and she threads her arm through the crook of his elbow, pulls herself as close to him as she can with the bags in the way.

“... I want to have a baby,” he’s whispering it, and it sounds painful. She feels a rush of fondness for him all of a sudden, at how hard he’s trying to convince her with his own nervousness, at how he’s been watching babies and young parents at the mall all morning with wishful glances, how he hasn’t seen Katya doing it too, caught up in his own anxiety.

“Okay,” she’s grinning, biting her bottom lip. His head whips around to stare at her, his eyes scan her face, looking hard for a lie, and when he can’t find one he clamps her hand around all of the cardboard and plastic bag handles, pulls her to the wall and kisses her, dropping the bags on the floor in his excitement, shaky hands cupping her cheeks, careful to not smear her foundation.

He pulls back and she can’t help but laugh at the look on his face, how her lipstick is smeared on his mouth.

“Are you serious?” He’s wide-eyed and he looks so young, like he did that first morning when she’d given him the pills and water, when she’d blocked the sun from his dry brown eyes.

“Yeah, I’m serious, Trix,” and he’s kissing her again, and when he’s done she picks up half of the bags, slides her phone back into her purse. She can hear her own heels clacking on the floor as they exit the mall, and she can’t really imagine holding a tiny human’s hand, walking it out of the mall after buying it new toys and clothes. But she thinks that it’ll be easy to get used to, and it’ll probably be fun as well.

That night he prepares a bubble bath for them to share, and Katya slides in next to him, arms twisting around his torso.

“I wish I could get pregnant,” he whispers, giggling. She wheezes, pushes him out of her arms to the edge of the tub.

“Shut the fuck up, I don’t,” she’s laughing so hard that the water is splashing out of the tub onto the floor, Trixie is pulling her back to him from the edge.

She’s still laughing as his hands migrate to her breasts and his thigh shifts so that she can grind against it, he lets her swing a leg over his waist and grind against his dick. 

“Shit,” Trixie’s forehead is wrinkled and Katya kisses it to smooth it out. She licks down across his eyebrow and eyelid to his mouth, kisses both sides of his lips before sliding her tongue inside. His fingers are digging into her ass cheeks, pulling her to grind harder down on him. The water is splashing around them, still so hot that Katya’s sweating where she’s in the air above her waist. 

“My ass hurts,” Trixie’s whispering, sliding her wet hair behind her ear, his cool fingers making her shiver. She climbs off of him and attempts to find a comfortable position to no avail, and it’s not helping that he won’t take his hands off her, he keeps pinching her nipples and kissing her shoulder, and she settles to sit straight up, kneeling on the hard porcelain, wrapping a hand around his dick to pump it under the water.

“Katya,” he’s whining into her mouth, and she always has to do the heavy fucking lifting, she’s ancient and he’s younger than her so he should be kneeling over her right now, maybe he should be like, fucking sucking her off under the water, but his fingers are digging into the muscles on her back that he’s obsessed with and he’s jerking her off too, at the same time, in the same rhythm.

He pinches her nipple and she comes through it, his teeth are lightly scraping against the side of her neck and he’s pressing little kisses there under her ear, onto her wet hair that’s sticking there. She speeds up and tightens her hand and he’s coming in seconds, hands tangled in her hair and thumbs on her temples.

It’s hot in the bathroom and the water still hasn’t cooled off, so he leans back and pulls her on top of him, so that her back is against his chest, and he washes her hair gently with her dye-preserving Aveda shampoo that doesn’t really do much to keep her hair hydrated.

As he presses her warm shoulders down into the water, he whispers _thank you_ in the tiniest voice she’s ever heard him speak in. It’s like she’s having hourly flashbacks to the first months of their relationship, when he’d come to the door and told her that he was moving in, or that first morning with the sun rising slowly, when they were holding hands. 

It’d been like this when they’d gotten married, too, he’d gotten soft and gentle with her in ways he’d never been before, he’d gone out of his way to hold her hand and hold doors for her and he’d written song after song after song about her. 

She can feel it coming like a tidal wave, all of his overbearing love, and this time, since she’s ready for it, she’s determined to enjoy it for all it’s worth. 

She’s also determined to enjoy it before they have a tiny person running around the house that Katya has to keep track of all the time, she’s determined to enjoy it before she runs out of time to sleep in the night and her morning yoga classes aren’t as refreshing.

Once the water’s cooled off she heaves herself out, grabs a towel to wrap her hair in and another to dry herself off with, Trixie yelling in indignation with how she’s leaving him to drain the tub. She dries off, laughing in the bedroom, dripping onto the dark green rug. 

“Bitch! Come back here,” Trixie is mumbling to himself in the bathroom, she can hear him brushing his teeth and gargling mouthwash. She leaves the towel for her body on the floor, and makes sure that the towel on her head is balanced before shuffling into the bathroom, taking out her own toothbrush and standing at the other sink to brush and floss.

```

Trixie is so wonderful with Vera.

Vera has designated them as her new babysitters of choice, and three days a week Katya picks her up from daycare, brings her to the house so she can pee and have a snack, then she’ll take her to the park. Trixie is writing and he’s at the studio a lot, laying down melodies and trying things out that Katya doesn’t even pretend to understand, but sometimes he’ll come along with the two of them and go down the slide with Vera in his lap.

He talks to Vera as if she’s an adult (she could be, she’s very astute and unbothered for four). Katya does, too, but when Trixie does it it’s the cutest thing she’s ever seen, he’s patient and engages with her.

Katya calls Julie to ask very nicely if she can start reading _Harry Potter_ with Vera and she receives an enthusiastic yes along with ten minutes worth of praise for her and Trixie’s babysitting skills. And then Julie turns serious near the end of the call.

“Oh, and Katya?” Katya was still reeling from the compliments, and her heart didn’t think to drop in anxiety.

“Yeah!”

“I know you’ll be a wonderful mother,” Katya’s heart skips a beat, flies to her throat. She gives an awkward _thank you_ and Julie hangs up laughing. Katya’s heart is beating at top speed, her eyes are watering and her fingers buzzing.

Katya sits on the couch staring blankly at the screen of her phone for so long, Trixie (who had heard the entire exchange) silent next to her.

“She’s right, you will,” he says, half focused on her and half focused on his videogame. It pulls her out of her stupor and she grins across the couch to him.

“You want me to suck you off while you kill people in your game? Is that what men like?” She laughs, and then he’s watching her with blown-out pupils, letting her unzip his fly and grunting as she takes him all the way down, hot and wet and whimpering at his fingers in her hair.

```

Katya’s never done a piece on Trixie’s love. And before the baby comes she feels deep-seated panic about it, how she’s never expressed it in the best way she knows how.

So she closes the door to her spare room and tarps the walls and floor with white sheets, spreads fingers across them to flex out the wrinkles that just reappear under her bare feet.

She places out the trash bags unopened, flat, on the floor in the corner and drips honey on them so it’s speckled, so her feet and toes and ankles are covered in it, running down her thighs. She wants to feed Trixie blueberries, she stands on the chair and writes his name in blueberry’s blood on the wall, the brown of his eyes. She lights a joint, ashes falling on her denim shorts, her naked breasts untouched.

She stands to stare at the ceiling and watch the smoke gather for a second, breathe before she opens the window to let it out, her straw-colored hair sticking to her red lips. The honey is drying and making it ache to bend her limbs. Trixie is knocking on the door and she exhales more smoke, sticky feet to the window to wrench it open, arms aching. 

He opens the door and sees her filming, gives an _Oh!_ and closes it behind him, she clamps her fingers on her shoulders and lets herself stretch with his voice that he traps behind him in the room.

She’s so dizzy and her heart is beating hummingbird’s wings. He’s in the kitchen making dinner and he’ll ask her about the piece later, knows to not interrupt her filming well enough to allow it to simmer for the rest of the shot. She can feel the baby in her gut, a tight grip of skin and she can feel her feet kicking against her fingers.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Baby?” She rarely calls him pet names. He’s in the living room in seconds, she’s sitting cross-legged on the futon, blushing beneath her foundation. He wants to wreck her so bad, she looks so small all curled up, so dainty and breakable but with defined biceps, sharp nose and cheeks framed by curls.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THIS INCLUDES UPDATED WARNINGS:  
> yay! here’s bonus chapter 2. a real, full throwback chapter! the timeline is pretty clear, i think. VERy corny, full of hurt/comfort, this comes from a deep place inside me where i’m actually a soft person with issues. this chapter deals with gender dysphoria & i don’t want that to upset anyone, so here is your warning. other (minor) warnings include blood & angst. but everything turns out okay in the end, as we have seen.
> 
> this chapter wouldn’t exist without all the wonderful people that have messaged me on tumblr saying that they connect to katya’s story and wanted more of it in the fic AND the person who asked me if trixie would ever top in this fic ;) ! thank you all so much, your support and love has meant the world to me. 
> 
> there’re also some fun (smutty) parts in this fic that wouldn’t be possible without the lady herself… and if you can guess what they are, message me about it ;) the prize is validation from me & your peers.
> 
> and this is the penultimate chapter! :’( see you on the other side!

Trixie is all moved in, now. It feels no different from how it felt those first two weeks, and that’s probably telling. Katya has since brightened, and Trixie has been watching her carefully the past three weeks, monitoring her behavior closely.

“Katya?” She’s in the kitchen, getting coffee. It’s 8am and they both have the day off. Katya woke up in her silky camisole up against Trixie’s side, and it’s normal to have her there now, but he’s still surprised to see her out of drag, for some reason. 

And he knows it’s not drag, by now.

“Yes!” She yells back a little belatedly. He climbs out of bed, stumbles into the kitchen. She’s standing at the sink, naked but for the flimsy dress, and he wants to fuck her and run his hands through her short bangs, so that they stick up. 

“Morning,” Trixie comes to stand next to her. They should sweep the floor, he can feel little tiny rocks and dust under his bare feet. Her legs are smooth and hairless against his. She’s shorter than him and he likes it.

He takes her stubbly jaw in hand and pulls her face to kiss him. She whimpers against his mouth, they stand there with closed mouths pressing, Katya’s eyes wide open. She’s fighting smiling with her lips but she does, so that his lips bump against her teeth. He pulls back, reaches behind her to get the pot of coffee, pours himself some with her body still up against his, his chin on her shoulder, watching his own hands so he doesn’t spill.

“What’s the agenda for today?” He asks. Katya is softly rubbing her hand up and down his back. It tickles and he wants to suck her dick, but it’s too early for that right now.

“Hmmmmm,” Trixie pulls back, goes to sit at the table. She follows and he sees her gulp, as she puts her coffee down.

“What’s up?” Trixie watches her sip her coffee, retract the mug from her lips, blow on the hot liquid before sipping it again. “You okay?”

Katya nods, and Trixie lets his lips grow into a tiny smile. Her skin looks thin in the light, he doesn’t know if he believes her. He doesn’t think he knows her well enough to know if she’ll tell him, in time, what’s bothering her. He doesn’t want to push now, though, it feels wrong and he can tell she wants the subject changed.

```

“Babe?” Katya’s locked herself in the bathroom. She’s completely silent and she won’t answer Trixie when he knocks or when he calls for her.

He’d seen her go in an hour ago, and she hasn’t left, he’s been on the couch the entire time, waiting for her. He’d called her name trying to get her attention but she hadn’t answered. The shower isn’t running and it hadn’t been, and Trixie doesn’t know what’s going on in there because she hasn’t yelled at him that she’s taking a shit.

“Katya, please open up, are you okay,” Trixie is sitting on the floor outside the door now, knocking. It’s still locked and it’s still quiet in there. He can feel the tears welling up behind his eyelids, they’re stinging in the air of the fan propped on the floor against the desk.

He stands again, tries to turn the knob to no avail.

“Katya? Katya I’m going to have to kick the door in,” he’s full crying now, tears are running down his cheeks because he doesn’t know what he’s going to open the door to, his heart feels weak and he’s shivering all over and it won’t stop.

And then the door opens.

She’s sitting on the floor, curled up, she’s cut a gash in her chin shaving and she’s pressing white fingers to it. Trixie is immediately on the cold tile next to her, his bare knees hurt with the slam down and his hands are gently grasping Katya’s, she links their fingers together instantly. Her fingers are covered in blood and he should wash them. Her knees are drawn up to her bare chest and she’s shivering more than Trixie is.

He’s terrified.

“Can you get up? Can we wash this cut,” Trixie is standing, bracing her arms in his hands so she can prop herself up. She lets him hold her, and his heart hurts so bad with it, how she surrenders her entire body to him. How trusting she is. 

Trixie maneuvers her to the sink, gently wets his hand with warm water to rinse the cut on her chin that’s thankfully not as deep as it seemed to be when he first saw it under her fingers. 

“Does it hurt?” Trixie whispers as he’s pressing a washcloth to the red skin to dry it. Katya shakes her head and her lower lip pushes out, wiggles. He wishes she would cry, maybe scream, so he could hear what she’s feeling on the inside. 

“It all hurts,” Katya whispers. And it looks like it hurts to say it. He looks down to her thighs that have red marks from each of her fingers dug into them, sure to soon be a deep purple, fade to a yellow-green. 

Trixie’s heart is in his throat, he’s so completely out of his depth here in their blue bathroom in the middle of the night, the light bright and unforgiving in their faces. Katya won’t look in the mirror. 

“What can I do,” Trixie isn’t asking, because he knows she won’t answer, he’s sending up a prayer to fucking _anyone_ who will listen. Nobody tells him. 

Katya is still shivering and he holds her up with one arm, reaches behind the mirror to get bacitracin and a band-aid, patches her up with shaky fingers and fear pushing all directions in his throat and stomach. She isn’t watching him, her eyes are on the wall next to the lamp, he’s sure that she can see the mirror out of the corner of her eye. 

“Okay, we’re done, okay. Okay, let’s go to bed,” maybe she’ll feel better with sleep, Trixie doesn’t fucking know. But he hopes so, and once she’s asleep he’s going to do some frantic googling. 

She nods and lets her eyes close. Her blonde lashes are so long and they still have mascara on them. He won’t wipe it off in case it’s helping. But he doubts that it is, considering. 

Katya lets him help her to bed, lets him climb in next to her and hold her. He can feel her relax against him the moment she falls asleep about a half hour later. And the moment she starts snoring he slides out of her loose grip and makes his way into the living room to the desktop computer. 

_how to support trans partner_  
_how to help trans friend_  
_gender dysphoria_  
_gender dysphoria help_  
_how to show a woman you love her_

Katya wakes up foggy and off, she can barely remember being taken to bed. The last thing she wanted was for Trixie to see her like that, not when _she_ doesn’t even want to have to pinpoint her own issues, doesn’t want to have to pick them out in her mind.

She feels like she can’t move her mouth and realizes with exploring fingers that she must have cut herself with a razor last night and Trixie must have patched her up, put a bandaid there. 

It’s morning. And she feels considerably better but also exponentially worse than she did a few years ago. It’s just been getting worse. And boring, if she’s honest.

Trixie isn’t in bed with her. She heaves her achy body up to standing, her thighs burn the most and she sees that it’s because of her own fucking iron grip digging in. She has matching sets of five bruises on each patch of pale skin. 

She stumbles to the dresser to put on a huge t-shirt and underwear. She pulls herself through the doorway and immediately spots Trixie fast asleep in the swivel chair in front of the computer desk. She crosses over to him in the dull morning light. 

She wants to know why he’s sleeping at the desk and she quietly presses down on the space bar to not wake him. He’s a heavy sleeper, it won’t. He looks so young and she’s reminded of how she’s older than him, how he has to take care of her like she’s a baby, when he’s just a baby himself. 

He has a trillion tabs open and all of them make her smile, she files them away to cry about later. But the last one, hidden in a corner, _how to show a woman you love her_. That’s what makes her eyes twinge, he wants to _show_ her because he’s already _told_ her. She’s so in love with him it’s growing up to her chin, she can feel her teeth heavy with it. He’s still asleep with his head thrown against the back of the chair.

She shakes his shoulders gently, runs aching fingers over his jaw and holds her hand to his cheek, wiping over where his eyes will crinkle. He wakes up so slowly, and she watches it all, her eyes on his. She probably looks terrible, and he looks pretty destroyed too, she has vague memories of him crying into the bathroom door, yelling for her to open up and feels hot embarrassment run down her esophagus.

Trixie’s eyes open, finally, and then they widen and then his arms are tight around her middle, pulling her onto his lap on the chair. His nose is sticking to the skin of her neck. 

“Are you feeling better?” His voice is gruff with sleep and tears, cracking under Katya’s ear. Her throat closes up as his hands slide over her back gently, rubbing and scratching, up and down with her breaths.

“A little,” she whispers. It’s mostly true. And it’ll keep his worries at bay for now. She needs to regroup, figure out how to deal with herself, and then she can talk to him. Really talk, this time.

He picks her up, carries her to the bed, sets her on the sheets. She’s lost weight, and she doesn’t know _how_ , but she guesses that it’s probably stress and that she’s started smoking again at work where Trixie can’t see her or smell her. She’s sure that he knows, but maybe he doesn’t. She feels like it could happen at any second when she’s working, staring at the empty store in front of her, pretending to read while waiting for the next customer. The breakup. She works herself up into a frenzy, until Trixie texts her on his lunch break, sends her a heart or an interesting article he thinks she’ll like.

And she’ll let her fingers dig into the fabric of her t-shirt and pull, unravel the thread seams and chew at her hangnails until she comes home to him and kisses him and forgets about her doubts when he jokingly wrestles her into the bathroom and streaks heavy blush onto her cheekbones as he’s doing his own makeup for the night’s show.

And sometimes before shows he’ll grip her hand firm in his, kiss her veins with pink lips and wink at her with heavy false lashes, and she’ll see the nerves in his eyes. And it’ll reassure her that they’re both human, and it’s new, and they both have shit they need to deal with.

So she lies in bed at night with Trixie sleeping next to her and she’s settled in it. Settled in the sheets and settled in her own mind, and the best part of all of it is that Trixie is there, next to her, and he’s not going to leave. And she thinks that knowing that is the biggest step she can take to know that she’ll be fine, to know that she can anything she wants, to know that she’ll have one tiny piece of permanence.

“Trixie,” she’s poking him in the shoulder, it’s quiet but for his breathing. The clock says that it’s 2am, it’s Tuesday, and she has work at 8. “Brian.”

He’s up in seconds, humming and rubbing his eyes. It’s still pitch black but for the light from the streetlamp, and it glints off of Trixie’s dark eyes. She puts her hand to his cheek, his stubble under her fingers. It’s nice, soft like hers isn’t. 

“What’s up? What time is it?” He mumbles against her palm, kissing it softly. She giggles a little as he yawns against her skin. 

“Can we talk?” And then Trixie’s eyes are wide open and he’s propping himself up on his elbow, nodding.

They sit at the kitchen table with the lamp on overhead, and Katya feels a little bit like she’s being interrogated. Trixie makes chai and sets her mug out in front of her, it’s going to keep both of them up but it’s calming, anyway, and he sits next to her, pulls up his chair so that their hips are touching, takes her hand in his and holds his mug with his left.

He just sits quietly, blowing on his tea with pretty lips, waiting for her to talk. He’s not going to push, wants her words first, and she knows this from almost a year of grappling with how supportive he is. She can hear him breathe and swallow, can feel him warm next to her. Her stomach is in knots but it’s not as bad as it could be, because he’s not going to interrupt and he’s just going to sit and listen, and nod, and he didn’t pull up a chair across from her to force her to look in his eyes, to put them on a power plane.

“I love you,” he whispers, and takes another sip of tea. She lets herself rest her head on his warm shoulder, his soft faded t-shirt. 

“I love you too,” She mumbles, and then he straightens so her back doesn’t hurt. And she spews her guts, for three hours, they move to the couch and he lets her sit on his lap and whisper into his ear, and he sits and nods, like she knew he would, and he’s done so much more research than she thought he would have, he must have spent hours googling, only to keep his mouth shut until she wanted to open hers. 

She falls asleep on him leaking tears, and he has her call in sick in the morning when the alarm on her phone goes off. He wraps her in blankets and it snows, out the foggy window. They search for therapists in Boston and she calls in for an appointment, and he holds her hand the whole time even though he knows she doesn’t need it. And then he drags her out of the house in heavy boots and jackets, wool hats, to walk to the park and throw snowballs at each other viciously, and all sound is so muffled. 

Trixie’s cheeks are flushed, and he can’t stop smiling. She knows that it’s for her, and she can’t stop smiling either. They trudge through unshoveled sidewalks to Starbucks, and they sit under the unforgiving lighting for an hour, giddy and stupid.

“God, fuck, the next few months are gonna be gross,” Katya says, mouth covered by her cup of coffee. Trixie blinks and then he scooches his chair closer to hers. He smells like sweat and cold, and there’s a snowflake drying on his eyelashes. He doesn’t say anything but he lets her grip his wrist tight where it’s resting on the table. “But good, ya know? The best.” He nods, smiles, holds her hand around his wrist with both of his.

And Thursday night before her first appointment Katya gets wasted on wine while Trixie is still at work, and she’s almost blacked out when he comes home at 6pm but she remembers stumbling to him at the door, taking his face in her hands, her own eyes open wide, and whispering “You’re gay,” and bursting into tears, sobbing into his chest, shaking and passing out on top of him on the couch. He whispers so much to her that night but she can’t hear it and he knows it, so when she’s finally drifted off he plans what he’s going to say in careful sentences, practices it in his head.

When she wakes up in bed the next morning he’s there with a bowl of cereal and a cup of coffee, and he cuddles up next to her, takes both of her hands in his, makes her face him. She tries to look down at the sheets, she’s hungover and she needs to rest so that she can deal with an hour’s worth of invasive questions from a stranger with the only comfort being that Trixie will be waiting out in the parking lot for her. 

“Do you think I’m going to leave?” He whispers. She shivers, her spine bends, and he pulls her chin up so they lock eyes. “I’m not going to leave. I love you so much.”

She can’t bring herself to cry, so she just lies there and eats her cereal, with Trixie’s strong hands rubbing her feet and calves, slowly bringing her out of her hangover.

```

Katya is touching herself, which she rarely does now, since Trixie is here living with her, loving her good. But she’s doing it cause he isn’t home, he’s been out shopping with Pearl for hours and Katya is so horny, so indescribably horny.

So horny that she’s wearing her most expensive, wavy blonde lace front, sprawled naked on the bed, toes curling as she pinches her own nipples, squeaks. It goes right to her dick, the noise, a tiny gasp on a little vocalized _oh!_ that makes her fingers feel skinnier.

“Oh, mmm,” Katya is going to let it all out, Trixie isn’t home and she wants to just whine and moan, at the top of her vocal chords, squeeze her own balls and trace a finger back to her hole, just barely press in. “Ah!”

She hasn’t done this in so long, just let herself go, put on long flowing hair and let herself breathe shallowly, high and aching in her throat. She’s always hoarse afterwards, her tongue dry, and maybe she hasn’t even let herself moan like this while she’s been with Trixie. A year and a half, and she’s come so hard fucking him but has never let herself whine like a woman.

“Trixieeeee,” she fades into a whimper, shuts her lips to hum the note, and her fingers slide down her stomach to her dick. She just rubs across it with her palm, she’s already so wet and she knows how it goes, she’s going to come in record time, she lets herself gasp for show, dainty and surprised. Her own noise makes her dick twitch and she lets out a long, breathy whine. Her eyes roll back into her head and her biceps flutter, ache.

“Oh, hmmm,” it’s dark out the window, and if the neighbors were home they would be able to see her, how she’s sweating under her wig, how her eyes are scrunched up. “Trixie, baby.”

Katya’s voice is fluttering and it’s so hot, God it’s so hot, she’s imagining Trixie fucking into her slowly, gripping her all over, big hands on her waist. He would kiss her around her whimpers, kiss her neck to feel them catching in her throat, she’d be prone and he’d just fuck into her so hard, and it’d be so wet ‘cause he’d use too much lube and he’d close his eyes and Katya is just letting herself gasp and whine over and over, she’s whimpering, tightening her fingers around her dick, twisting with each pump.

The thought of Trixie all over her, she’s sobbing his name high in her throat, all over her with fingers digging into her shoulders, _Trixie_ , kissing her on the chin, scraping teeth so she’d gasp. She’s making little _ooh!_ ’s with lips in a circle, biting her bottom lip around her hums, she’s working herself up so bad and if Trixie was here he’d-

“Katya?” Katya’s hand flies off her dick faster than she can comprehend the sound. “Is that you?”

Trixie is pushing the bedroom door open and for once in her life Katya regrets their nonexistent boundaries. His eyes widen at her naked on the bed, and her dick is still so hard, up against her stomach, his lips are bitten red and he’s looking down at it, up at her hair. He takes a step forward. Then three. She can tell that he’s hard already.

“Was that you?” Katya bites her lip. He’s looking down at her and it’s so hot, his big hands, she’s so vulnerable and he wants her, his forehead scrunched up with the question. “Were you just whining in here.”

His voice is so deep, he’s turned on and she nods, her eyelashes flutter of their own accord. His hands are on her chest, then, spread fingers, he’s sitting on the bed next to her. He trails a hand down to her dick.

“Moan then,” Trixie wraps his hand around her, but he’s watching her face and she can’t help it, lets out a little sob at his fingers tight and hot. “You like that? You sound pretty,” Trixie starts to pump her faster, and he unzips his fly with fumbling fingers of his other hand, pulls his dick out to match the same rhythm. Katya whines outright at the compliment, and her head falls back against the pillow, she closes her eyes.

“Katya. Look at me,” Katya moans, lets it close off into tiny sobs, they’re so high in her ears and Trixie’s hand is so good, strong on her, she’s going to come and it’s going to be so loud, he’s going to jerk her through it. She looks at him, his big brown eyes and his strong shoulders, she’s going to die, he’s so hot and he likes it when she whines like a woman.

“Turn over,” he whispers. She whimpers again, catching in her throat, he lets go of her dick and his fingers move to her shoulders and squeeze, and he flips her body like it’s nothing, fingers digging into her skin, into her ass cheeks. It makes her shudder, and then his thumb is running over her hole, and it surprises her into a shriek, and he groans right back, he’s pushing his thumb in, and it’s not going to be enough and he hasn’t used lube, he just wants her to scream more.

“Please,” Katya whimpers as he pumps his thumb in-and-out, so achingly slowly. She’s so full and so overwhelmed, Trixie’s hands on her and in her and he smells like beer, he’s been out all day and his face looks so nice back in their bedroom, his eyes so glassy, scanning over her body.

“Trixieee,” she whines again, like she did when she was alone, and he growls at it, attaches their lips, kisses her through the little noises. She’s on the very edge and he’s lying half on top of her, his shirt rubbing against her bare skin, he’s fully clothed and she’s so naked, her hair spread across the pillow, bangs falling in her eyes. “Trixie.”

And then he speeds up, pumps into her twice before she’s coming with an “Ah! Oh my god,” and he’s moaning into her cheek, pulling up closer to her, so he can smell her, kiss her hard through his own orgasm minutes later. She lies back and lets him press fingers into her stomach as he comes, groaning, and she gasps when he slides his fingers off, tickling her a little.

```

He watches her the next few days. She can feel his eyes on her, trying to read her, and it makes her insane in the best way. He wants her, she knows it, he’s all hot and bothered over her noises and he wants to fuck her hard into the mattress, watch her come undone underneath him, vulnerable and open for him. He wants to fuck his woman, and she wants her man to fuck her even more.

Something inside her is fighting it. He can tell, can see it in her face, her clenched jaw as she eyes him watching her. He can’t stop looking at her, she’s been in a phase of wearing short dresses around the house with full, heavy makeup, her nice wigs all the time, and he knows that ninety percent of that is her figuring herself out. But ten percent of it, he’s sure, is going towards seducing him to fuck her hard.

He just needs to get her to the point that she breaks, breaks her petty nervousness that he knows she hates, breaks her stubbornness at needing the upper hand, breaks her unwillingness to try new things unless she’s the active one in the situation. Because what she doesn’t know, and Trixie is achingly aware of this, is that she could ask him for anything and he would give it to her. He’s that fucking whipped. Well. He wouldn’t murder for her, but he’ll certainly make her feel like a princess with his dick in her ass and then let her fuck him hard on the futon the literal next night. It won’t change a thing.

“Baby?” She rarely calls him pet names. He’s in the living room in seconds, she’s sitting cross-legged on the futon, blushing beneath her foundation. He wants to wreck her so bad, she looks so small all curled up, so dainty and breakable but with defined biceps, sharp nose and cheeks framed by curls.

“Yeah?” He’s panting, holding himself up against the wall from how fast he jumped from his seat at the table. She’s grinning at him from under dark fanning lashes, wide red lips. 

“Will you fuck me tonight?” His stomach drops out his ass, his knees give out a little at how she’s so slick but at the same time somehow still blushing furiously, squeezing the blanket in her fingers. She’s wearing long earrings filled with diamonds, they’re shimmering and brightening her eyes in the early afternoon light, and he somehow remembers to close his jaw.

“Yeah,” he grins, laughs a little at the end, nods, and the desperate pull to normalcy was worth how her shoulders drop in relief, how her tiny tiny smile grows, so he can see her teeth. God, she’s so beautiful in this lighting, she’s glowing and swimming in her dress and the warm blanket around her, like she’s perched in a big nest, severe makeup softened by her twinkling eyes.

“See you later,” she giggles, pats the top of her wig to make sure that it’s still sitting properly, keeps laughing as he groans and turns back to where his laptop is sitting on the kitchen table. 

So he purposefully goes out, lets her prepare herself alone in the apartment in case she’s still nervous, lets her dress up and shower while he’s out shopping for nightgowns at vintage stores in a daze, grocery shopping and shoving anything and everything that looks good in the cart, only to take half of it out at the register ashamedly. 

It’s been seven hours when he starts back. If he hadn’t been texting her telling her where he was the whole time and getting (semi) regular replies he would have felt guilty, but now it’s dark and he wants his fingers on her, up inside her.

Being gone the whole day will just make it better, and they both know it, she likes to be away from his skin for a little and then she’s all over it, practically drooling all over him, running her hands across his back greedily. She’s going to be needy tonight, and he’s never fucked her before, he doesn’t know what to expect but he knows she’s going to be a fussy princess about it. It’s going to kill him.

She’d whined so prettily the other day. Her chest had been so flushed, she’d been so sweaty and her skin had glowed with it as she panted tiny whimpers. He’d wanted her on his dick so bad, wanted her to make even sweeter noises with him big inside her. And now he’s going to get it, to hear her, and to feel her tight and so hot around him. He’s almost half-hard with the thought of it, but his body seems to understand that he needs to wait, for once.

She’s waiting for him behind the door and she opens it as he climbs up the stairs. She’s in the shadow of the ugly hall fluorescent, behind the doorframe, and she watches him climb the steps, hidden from his sight. He’s carrying exactly five full bags, and she’s watching him without helping for the sake of her goddamn outfit reveal. 

Which makes sense, because once he’s up the stairs and dropping all of the bags on the floor, she comes apart from the wall and he’s never seen her so beautiful. It isn’t true, the night he first met her is always a winner, but his jaw is hanging now, he’s panting at how pretty she is standing demurely in front of him. He shuts the door slowly, locks it while still watching her, and the longer he stares the bigger her smile grows.

She’s overlined her lips more than she ever has, her upper lip is lazily uneven as always, and she’s biting into the red a little, eyes on him. She’s wearing bangs, she isn’t contoured and her blush is radiating across her cheekbones, her blonde curls bouncing as she crosses her arms in front of her. Her earrings are sparkling in the low light, she’s grinning and he wants to die, wants to unzip the tight black long sleeve dress as slowly as possible until she’s begging for him to hurry up, gasping under his hands.

“Hi,” she says. Her voice is affected, high and breathy, or maybe it’s that she’s already hard from watching Trixie climb the stairs, carrying all the bags in his arms. She’s rubbed herself on his arm before, laying on his side and getting herself off, and he’d let her, and she’d groaned against his neck so low, had jerked his dick without rhythm as she let her dick slide along his muscles. 

“Hey,” he clears his throat. “You look beautiful,” her eyes squint with how wide she’s grinning, opening her mouth to show her tongue pushing against her teeth, her hands are grabbing for him, then, Katya pulls at his ears and opens her mouth so wide to kiss him, if it was anyone else Trixie would be grossed out, bored, but something about how Katya sucks at his lips, lathes her tongue all over Trixie’s mouth, it’s endless and hard and he whimpers through it. Katya laughs through her nose at him, whines a little, too, and starts to pull his hands with her, keeping their lips connected, kicking an Amazon delivery box out of the way to take him to the bedroom.

He wants to take her right here, against the wall, dress hiked up and curls bouncing up and down with each thrust, moans cut off with his dick inside her, her high moans would be loud through the door, anyone walking past on the street would hear her and fuck, think she was a porny young woman getting fucked hard by a big strong man, Trixie’s eyes cross at the thought as she finally gets his feet unstuck from the floor to follow her.

“Come on, want you to fuck me, Trixie,” Katya is saying, she’s stumbling over her words like she does when she’s horny and can’t focus on anything but Trixie’s dick and ass. But this time she’s going to lie back shyly against the pillows, let him finger her slowly, and let him stuff her full with his dick.

“Yeah, yeah, lie down,” Trixie can’t throw her around like they usually both do, it’s different and he wants her to feel like a real princess, wants to fuck her so good that she can’t control herself, can’t stop herself from coming with how good it feels, with his hand just lightly pumping her.

She rests her head on the pillows and Trixie can tell that her wig is pinned in tighter than she ever would usually. Her eyelashes are fluttering, she’s already panting, and he stands next to the bed and strips as fast as he can with her watching him, almost trips on his underwear. His dick is already hard because of how she’s acting, and his whole body is flushed, his nipples are oversensitive. She’s rubbing herself slowly through the dress, eyes on his dick, and he grunts as he sits down on the bed next to her, yanks her up by the hair to kiss him again.

“Hmmmmf,” she groans into his lips, he never wants her to stop making so much noise, all of them go right to his dick and he has to take deep breaths in through his nose to try to bring himself back down from the edge. Her fingers are digging into his back, scraping her nails down, he lets himself spread out on top of her, his dick rubbing against the fabric of her dress, her heels coming up to dig into the backs of his thighs.

“Trixie, pleaseee,” she’s pulling on his shoulder, pinching the skin, and he groans as she tries to reach behind herself to unzip her dress with her other hand. She can’t reach, he’s too tangled around her, and he pulls her up to sitting on his lap quickly so he can hook his chin over her shoulder, put his hands on her waist and slowly unzips her, her back is a little damp with sweat, and he loves her skin so much, loves being able to put his hand over her spine and feel her muscles move under his fingers. She wiggles in his lap, grinds her tight ass down on his dick, and he pulls the dress off her shoulders as fast as he can, pushes her shoulders back down against the pillows.

“Stay still,” he chokes out, and she whimpers at it, bites her bottom lip and closes her eyes for a brief second as he pulls the dress all the way down past her fancy bra, stopping at her belly button that’s heaving with her breaths. She tries to get back up but he holds her down with his hands, her pale skin is so soft and Trixie holds himself together watching her curls stick to her lipstick, her mouth fall open as he unhooks her bra, pinches both her nipples. 

“Baby, come on,” she’s full-on whining now, and her voice is so high, Trixie’s stomach is burning hot and his thighs are aching, he’s dripping where his dick is rubbing against her dress, and he pulls the dress off all the way so that he can see her dick straining to exit her thong.

She whimpers and he pulls her thong off, too, lets her dick spring to her stomach, dripping there. He runs his thumb over the head and Katya’s hips jerk up, he licks her wetness off of himself when he lets go and she whimpers at the sight, her eyes are downcast at him and her lashes are so dark against her pink cheeks. 

“You ready?” Trixie can’t wait. He’s going to come at any moment, and he needs to come inside of her, needs to fill her up, he’s too impatient for any more foreplay and he doesn’t think that she minds with how her hips are raising off the bed trying to get to him, he reaches to the side table to grip the lube between shaking fingers. Her fingernails are peach, salmon pink, and she’s pinching her own nipples, her chin reaching to the ceiling as she whines, she’s making consistent achy noises that are ruining him.

He grips her hips and her whine ends in a sob, her dick bobs and she scrunches up her forehead in concentration. She grips the sheets with both hands, the veins up and down her arms stand out and he licks his lips, takes a deep breath before popping the cap, squirting just enough onto his fingers, and then he’s running them across her hole so that she’s panting and gritting her teeth, gasping as his pointer finger slides inside, she’s prepared and she’s a little loose already, he wants to just slam into her but he’ll go slow, slow for now and then fuck her good and hard in a few minutes, make her curls bounce.

“More, Trixie,” she’s whining and her dick is dripping more on her stomach, her bangs are sticking to her forehead. He pushes in a second finger and scissors then, pushes in deep so she gives him a big shiver, a long, high moan. He’s gritting his teeth too, he’s about to burst and he needs to be fucking her, she’s so fucking pale and delicate, she’s wearing two gold necklaces and they’re sliding over her chest, her sweat. “Please, Trixie I need it.”

She’s moaning like a porn star, she’s wiggling down onto his fingers and as he brushes against her prostate she shrieks, pulls him down to connect their lips. He kisses her bottom lip, her mouth is hanging open and she can’t kiss him back, her eyes rolled back into her head. She’s thrusting up so that she rubs against his hip, and then bearing back down so he fingers her faster, she’s coming apart completely beneath him and she bites his shoulder as he pulls his fingers out of her, lines his dick up with her hole.

He slides lube across himself and then pushes in, she’s sobbing whimpers, little _Trixie!_ ’s, tiny gasps and she takes his hand, wraps her fingers so tightly around his that it hurts. He slides in about halfway and stops, closes his eyes to her dainty lips and her fluttering stomach. He takes slow, heavy breaths to try to calm himself down and he does, finds a way to push all the way inside at her nod.

And then he’s all the way inside and she makes the sweetest sound, half-whimper, half-moan, throwing her head back as he pulls out just the smallest amount and thrusts back in hard, and yeah, her curls bounce with it, and she takes his other hand, sticky with lube, in hers so that she’s holding both of them, he brings his lips down to her neck to kiss around the cool metal of the necklaces, feel her sweat on his cheeks.

“Baby, harder, Trixie, more more more,” she whispers, and then he’s fucking into her, as hard and fast as he possibly can, and she’s sobbing into his mouth, bringing his hand to her dick and when she comes she clenches so tight around him that he gasps, squeezes her ass tight, pulling her down on him hard, coming deep inside her so that she whimpers on his cheek.

She lies on top of him after climbing out of bed to wipe herself down on shaky legs, after unpinning her wig and dropping it lazily on the dresser on top of all of her jewelry. She’ll be angry in the morning when all of her earrings are stuck in the curls, but he isn’t going to say anything, not while she’s climbing back into bed with him, crawling on top of him and digging her toes into his calves. 

“Thank you,” she mumbles against his collarbone. She’s like putty, he takes her arm and brings it around his waist, trails tiny kisses from her earlobe down to her lips, presses their lips together for a good minute, slow-moving, no tongue. She sighs through her nose and he grips her little curved waist. She smells like sex and sweat and makeup, her bra is still crumpled at the end of the bed. Trixie reaches behind himself to turn the light off, and she’s asleep almost instantly, cuddled up so close to him like she almost never does.

“You’re welcome, I love you,” he whispers back in the dark, and he can feel her smile on his shoulder.

```

Katya’s blossoming, her cheeks are rosy in the autumn air, and she crunches on leaves delightedly out on the front sidewalk or when she’s smoking in the backyard of the quadruplex, under the tree, hat pulled down over her ears. Trixie is helping her quit and he’s following her quietly to her therapist and doctor, one step behind but close enough that they can see he isn’t fucking around with her health.

She’s glowing. Literally and figuratively. She’s spending more time outside and her veins aren’t so dark blue anymore, covered by the sun. It’s chilly out and they can see each other’s breaths but she goes out in t-shirts and shorts, sits in the backyard and lets herself breathe. Trixie is glad she does it.

Her skin is so much softer, smoother. He can’t stop touching her and she can’t stop touching him, not even sexually, but in the kitchen, holding her hand if she wants him to, pinching her chubby cheek.

Trixie comes out to the backyard where she’s sitting on the green plastic chair, in the grass, her hair pulled back where it’s growing out with a folded bandana. She’s wearing one of his old sweatshirts that says ‘Lake Michigan’ in faded lettering across the chest, and the red leaves from the almost-bare tree are piled up under her sneakers and around the legs of the plastic table.

She’s smoking and her fingers look cold, Trixie can see his own breath, it’s a crisp fall day, the kind he thought he would miss the most from Milwaukee. He should have known that Katya would have them, too, with her pale biceps and cool blue eyes. She smiles at him where he’s sitting with his guitar across from her, just strumming whatever comes to mind. 

Trixie wants to reach across the table and take her rounding chin in hand, squeeze her cheeks. All of her extra fat flushes her, her nose is thinning and she looks so soft and content in the sunlight. 

“Baby,” Trixie’s eyes slide to make contact with hers, leave where her lips are spilling smoke to catch his attention.

“Yeah,” Trixie says, raises his eyebrows and she smiles, cigarette propped between perfect teeth. His stomach flutters, the sun is behind her head to the side, it’s casting shadows and the blonde hairs of her eyebrows are glinting with it. The tips of her ears are red.

“Play me a song,” Katya takes a long drag, staring him down, her smile dropping into a little smirk. “You know, I wanna suck your dick while you play guitar sometime, that’d be hot.”

Trixie gulps and just starts playing, singing quietly so that just Katya can hear, and she leans forward on her elbows on the table, rests her head on her upper arm, just watches him the whole way through with a small, happy smile. And the whole time his stomach is clenched tight, blooming heat.

They sit out for the rest of the sunlit day, eating apple slices and chatting, Katya pretending to sing along with Trixie’s playing, and then they go to bed early, cuddled naked in the cool bedroom under extra blankets, Katya’s hand cold on his stomach.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Trixie Mattel!” She yells to him, holds her arms wide open. She’s swaying on her feet, bending her knees excitedly, she’s half-laughing and he is too, picking up his pace to get to her sooner. He drops his bags and leaves his suitcase next to her to take her into his arms, kiss her hard on the mouth. He can feel her lipstick coming off onto his lips.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The last chapter! I love each and every one of you for reading this, commenting on this, and sending me love on tumblr about this. Thank you all so much for reading! I am so happy to have been able to share this fic with you, it’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever done and I’m endlessly proud of myself for finishing it! I know that it went on forever, but here’s the end.
> 
> I want to thank matilda_queen for always giving the most beautiful prose about Katya in the comment section and making me cry hard about this fic on the daily, artificiallale for giving me the idea for this fic in the first place and being one of the most encouraging, supportive people I’ve ever met, and UNHhhh for being the Trixie to my Katya. Other special thanks goes to all of my mutuals on tumblr, you know who you are, you brighten my entire life, I am so lucky to know all of you <3
> 
> It’s only 6k and it’s just a little wrap-up, a little bit of angst but a lot of love. I hope you all love it as much as I do. Feel free to come cry with me over this tonight on [tumblr](https://fleursverts.tumblr.com/).
> 
> Also, I was going through my old notes for this fic and discovered that a possible name for this fic was "paroxysm." Which I love and wanted to share.

Katya knows hospitals and doctor’s offices well. 

She drives Maggie to her appointments, picks her up in her black car with the custom-ordered Trixie Mattel bumper sticker, windows tightly closed for how much they both sweat.

“You sweat like a pregnant lady,” Maggie laughs in her heavy Southern accent, tinkling over the construction work going on next to the Starbucks drive-thru.

“It’s because I am one, silly,” Katya pushes down her sunglasses to wink at her so she giggles even more.

Maggie is a twenty-seven year old platinum blonde lesbian from Georgia. She grew up outside of Athens and left for California at 18, to UCLA on a full ride for chemistry. She lives alone and she’s dating casually but she isn’t having much luck finding a woman that’s cool with her new girlfriend being three months pregnant.

So Katya takes her under her wing. They road trip to San Francisco and drive back hitting beach after beach along the way, Katya buries her legs in the sand and sends pictures to a dejected, left-out Trixie while he’s in Texas. 

Maggie was quiet and sweet at the surrogacy agency, she’d shaken their hands and she’d smelled like lilacs. Her white blonde hair was perfectly curled and she had about six big freckles on her nose. Trixie and Katya had instantly shared a look as she came into the room.

Once they’d interviewed her and told her that she would know if she was on their narrowed list of candidates by noon the next day, she left and Katya had turned to Trixie immediately, grinning excitedly.

“She looks like you in drag.”

“It’s her, obviously.”

So they’d enlisted the Dolly Parton lookalike to grow their baby inside her. They’d gotten overprotective of her instantly, and when Trixie leaves for another batch of shows, Katya enlists Maggie to be her new best friend. 

Maggie crochets little hats for the baby. She sits with Katya on the back patio, bare feet hanging off into the cool grass, drinking juice with clinking ice cubes, sheltered from the baking heat by the umbrella and eating tiny bars from Target that come in value packs of ten.

Maggie and Kim will be the baby’s godparents. Katya calls Maggie “auntie” to her stomach at her request, and calls herself Mama. She lies with Maggie on the couch and puts her ear up against her stomach, talks in circles of her own thought and talks from her heart, straight from her brain and stomach to the baby. She whispers to her as Maggie reads or watches TV, she tells her everything and anything, and Katya knows she’s a girl.

Maggie has endless Southern Belle patience, she lets Katya kneel down next to the sink as she’s washing dishes or making dinner and kiss her belly. 

Trixie sends Katya endless lists of possible baby names over text. He’s been doing research on girl’s names and boy’s names and neutral names, but Katya doesn’t comment on anything but girl’s names, doesn’t even exhaust the tiniest amount of brainpower to consider them.

Katya likes Minnie (too close to Maggie), Valerie (almost), Evelyn (too stuffy & Eve? Essentializes her gender), and Summer (her favorite). Trixie wants her to pick the name out of some sort of male guilt complex. Katya needs to remind him on an almost daily basis that they’re hardly a run-of-the-mill straight couple.

Trixie likes Summer, Miranda, and Jill, and they both know that they’re too scared to decide. So Maggie writes all of the names on tiny slips of paper in perfect, loopy cursive, picks one with her eyes shut tight. Katya is sitting on the island in the kitchen, sweating onto the marble, and Trixie’s hands are tightly squeezing the edge of the countertop.

```

Katya starts writing things down that she wants little baby Summer to know.

She keeps this long list in a tiny leather-bound notebook in her purse. She writes down little things about Trixie, lessons she’d learned in her childhood, things about the world. She wants to tell her about how her and Trixie met, she wants to tell her about how Trixie chased after her and she wants to tell the story of their cross-country road trip.

Katya wants Summer to grow up happy and safe and loved, she wants her to be careless but smart and she wants to hold her hand for just as long as she allows her Mama to.

Sometimes Katya can convince Maggie to stay overnight so that she can lie in the dark next to her with her hand on her stomach, feeling her warmth and knowing that the baby is there. She hasn’t started moving yet, but Katya knows that she’s in there, and she knows that Summer knows her Mama is there, holding her in her hand. 

The thing is, Katya is lonely. 

She feels very lost, lonely housewife, eating strawberries over the sink and drinking a pot of coffee by herself every day. It’s been like this for years, sure, but now that the baby is growing all of it feels so new, like Trixie’s left a big hole in the house.

Maggie knows that Katya is, in her words, “feeling blue,” and she comes over a lot after work. Sometimes when she works nights she’ll come to brunch with Katya after yoga, and they’ll sit at either the little French café or Perkins for hours just talking and laughing until she has to leave for work. 

Katya has just finished a run of performances, and Trixie flew back to catch two of them, and Maggie has gone to three on Katya’s free tickets, to use them up.

Katya knows that she doesn’t really _get_ what it means when Katya eats flowers petal by petal in the circle of people, but she still comments on what she thinks of it each night, in long, thoughtful texts. Katya cherishes them all, cherishes the baby being there too, in the cool, white rooms. And she especially cherishes them when she realizes that maybe this is what it’s like to have an adult daughter.

Katya is nesting.

When Maggie is busy sometimes Katya finds herself clicking her seatbelt in the hot car, burning her palms on the sizzling steering wheel, driving to Home Depot. She’ll spend so much time in the paint aisle looking at swatches that her eyes will cross.

Katya can’t stop buying parenting books off Amazon, the wall-to-wall bookshelf in the bedroom is completely full, so she stacks them in the bathroom on top of the toilet and on the stairs.

She’s addicted to buying children’s books as well, because she’s especially excited to read to the baby. She goes through lists and lists of socially conscious children’s books, reviewing each one and reading all of the available pages online before deciding if they’re helpful and informative.

Maggie is four months pregnant and Trixie is on tour for another three, and then he’ll be home for a year. Katya hasn’t argued with it once, he knows how she feels about it and she’s unafraid to speak her mind on the issue.

He’ll be done touring soon enough, she’s going to make sure of it. There’s no way she’ll be raising this baby alone. She could, but she’s not going to. And he’s not planning on that, either.

Maggie’s skin is glowing and her bright blonde hair is growing and full, Katya has dinner with her at least twice a week. She lets Katya drive her around, take her shopping and buy her chocolate but she also drags her to hell for acting like a babysitter.

And she can feel the baby coming like a bundle of nerves tight in her gut, and she finds herself at the doctor asking if she has an ulcer, because it’s always there. And when she comes home from seeing Maggie or meetings with museum curators and remembers that Trixie isn’t waiting for her it blooms out into a huge, heavy ache that fills her up all the way to her fingertips. One night she gets home from taking Maggie out to dinner and turns on all the lights in the empty house, turns on the TV and the record player to top volume, blasts Spotify from her laptop, and pukes three times in quick succession, arms shaking and toes clenching. Once all down her front and twice into the toilet.

She’s forty years old and she still needs Trixie to hold her hand, because seeing Maggie’s growing stomach over the tabletop had thrown her heart forward into her chest, beating impossibly fast through the entire meal. They’re going to have a baby, and Katya is going to spend long nights in the nursery feeding her through a bottle but holding her tight to her breasts, so that she can be rocked to sleep and know her Mama. Trixie will set her out on a blanket in the yard and play guitar for her in the sunshine, sing her lullabies at night and let her wrap her tiny hands around his fingers. He’s going to change her diapers when Katya is half asleep getting her lunch ready, and they’ll both settle her down for naps in her crib, they’ll both try to soothe her when she’s crying out in public.

And she feels wretched that he isn’t here, her fingers and all down the front of her dress are covered in her own vomit, and she’s crying for the first time in months, the first time since Maggie had called them excitedly from her bathroom floor. Katya is on the bathroom floor too, now, and she can’t get up, can’t call Trixie. She’s hyperventilating and pulling out her eyebrow hairs, something she hasn’t done since high school, and she’s never felt so alone.

```

Katya’s been going on long runs with Trixie being gone so often. Trixie is in Alabama or New York and she doesn't remember which. It doesn’t matter, he's far away, and if they were still living in Boston it wouldn't be nearly as far.

She lets her feet pound into the pavement, she lets the sun beat hot onto her black shorts and black sports bra, lets the sweat drip down her stomach and lets herself pant. 

It's hot in California like it wasn't hot in Boston, it's dry, airy heat instead of the heavy, wet heat of her bedroom in the old apartment on a cloudy summer morning with the window shut.

Trixie texts her constantly and it's reassuring, is the thing. She can't complain, because he does it for her. And it's why they're together. And why they're having a baby. Because they're a team. Because she loves him. 

Katya just wants to be able to have the team physically together for the months before the baby comes. She's going to be a mom, she's so excited, she's fucking petrified. And she hasn't physically had Trixie next to her in so long. It'll be another month before she sees him. 

Katya could come with him. He's said it, and she knows it. She could, easily, but she doesn't want to or need to. She has her own life and this has never been a problem. Their relationship and their marriage has never had any expectations like that. Not expectations that would force them to move their lives or their worlds for each other. 

But now, it has to be different. 

It's got to be, and as Katya jogs down the street, tits jiggling with each bounce of her feet, she realizes that it's going to have to come to a climax at some point. She's going to have to say something, and neither of them are going to like it. 

"Look. Trix," she's calling, sitting on a park bench, stretching her leg out next to her. She's still panting but she needs to just do it now, before she loses her nerve. Or maybe loses her momentary lapse of judgement. 

"Yeah?" He sounds nervous and he should be, she's certain that he can hear the nerves in her own voice. It's awkward in a way that it hasn't been in years. It's awkward in the way it was when they barely knew each other. Katya despises it. 

"You can't keep touring," there are people walking by and she's an idiot for calling him. She's regretting it already, bringing up the topic that they both already agree on but are bound to argue about, on a hot summer day in the middle of her run. Maggie is due at the house in two hours. Katya doesn't know how long this conversation will take. 

"I know," Trixie sounds defensive. Katya doesn't blame him, but she's annoyed, he should really understand by now, their baby is growing strong and healthy. He should be bending over backwards to cancel shows. 

"No, Brian, you don't get it," she's trying to lower her voice, a lesbian couple is walking past with their baby. Baby. 

"I'm pretty sure that I do, though, okay, I'm the one who's missing out, Katya. I'm missing out on all of it. I fucking hate it, and I hate myself right now. I've got to go. Fuck you for bringing this up,” and he hangs up with that, her jaw drops and she has to continue her run back home.

```

Trixie hasn't texted her back in a day.

She isn't stupid. She knows he's either avoiding her or angry with her, and she's so fucking upset with him that she can barely breathe, he’s being childish because he _knows_ that this conversation is inevitable. They both know it, that they have to have it. 

She calls him again and is met with his answering machine that’s her own fucking voice, giggling that _Mr. Brian Firkus can’t make it to the phone right now, please leave a message!_ She rolls her eyes at it, hates that it makes her want to laugh.

“Trixie, um. Trixie, I know that you know this is stupid. Because I do, too. But we have to talk about it. We have to talk about it, I’m not going to keep trying to call you because we both have to grow up and suck it the fuck up, we can’t be giving each other the silent treatment when we have a baby. Okay. I love you, call me. Please call me,” Katya sighs out the last phrase.

She’s exhausted, out on the back patio smoking her second joint of the day. Trixie is for sure in New York, she saw it on the _Milwaukee Happenings_ calendar hanging in the kitchen, the one that Trixie’s mom sends them every Christmas.

Katya’s skin is aching, her shoulders are a little burnt from her run and she stretches out in the chair to crack her knees. It’s 9pm and still bright out, and everything is so frozen in time. Maggie is long gone, she’s left an entire batch of vegan spaghetti for Katya to eat throughout the week. 

Katya inhales and lets the smoke sit inside her lungs for as long as she can. She can feel her heart beat faster and faster with how she’s holding her breath, and it’s comforting, the momentary control. Trixie won’t call her back tonight, she doesn’t think. And it’s okay, she has all the time in the world. She’s become patient, from loving Trixie and yoga and transitioning. And patience is going to have to be key in this fight. Because it is a fight. And that’s okay.

She knows that Trixie is about to snap. She can see it in his eyes over Facetime, she can hear it in his voice when he calls her after shows. She knows that he’ll be better off at home, but she needs to let him figure that out for himself.

She’s sad, and it’s okay. She’s fucking lonely, and that’s okay. Soon she won’t be lonely for at least 18 years, and that’s okay, too. She’s ready for her daughter and she’s prepared to deal with this bump in the road. And she’s high but she knows that it’s probably necessary for the two of them.

She’s still almost unspeakably angry with him, though. She’s going to yell at him when he calls back. She’s going to scream until he listens.

```

Trixie calls back early the next morning when he knows that Katya is still asleep. He’s being a big baby and he knows it. He’s more self aware in this fight than he thinks he’s ever been, he knows what he’s doing and he can see his own obnoxious behavior as if he’s watching himself outside of his own body.

But Katya always needs control, and that extends way outside of the bedroom. He likes _that_ kind of control, but the _other_ kind is what makes him insane, the kind of control where she has to tell him what to do, where to put things around the house, or when she snaps at him to listen to her.

It’s only grown with the incoming baby. Katya is nesting, she sends him pictures almost every day of the nursery and her progress on it, she’s built the crib and painted the walls a bright, mustard yellow that reflects the sun and warms the whole space. 

It looks beautiful, and Trixie is jealous. 

Trixie calls Maggie daily, and he knows that she’s spending time with Katya, lots of it, she doesn’t really talk about it to spare his feelings, probably, but he knows that they’re out canoodling in the backyard, reading poetry to each other and drinking lemonade in the sun while he’s trapped in the cloudy humidity of the Northeast. 

He knows that Maggie stays over and sleeps in their bed with Katya, he knows it from a hormonal phone call where she spilled the beans as she cried over dropping a plate of pastries on the floor. She’d gone on and on about how much she loves them both, and then she’d told him how Katya calls her in the night and asks if she wants to sleep over.

He knows how Katya sleeps next to her with a hand on her belly, holding their daughter, he knows that she can feel her against her soft hands, the smooth skin of her wrists.

And he wants it.

Trixie just wants to make more money so that they have it before the baby comes and time flies away from them like never before. He knows that Katya knows that, so he needs her to be more empathetic.

She doesn’t pick up. She’s asleep, but he can’t help the frustration that bubbles up inside him at the whole thing. He didn’t even want her to pick up, but now that she hasn’t he’s mad about that, too. He calls again, and again, until she answers.

“Trix?” She sounds panicked, he’s definitely woken her up and he feels a little badly about it but only because she sounds so nice saying his name.

“Hey,” he sounds surprisingly calm and he can hear Katya relax. 

“You called me back,” she’s tired and when she’s tired she’s even more brutally honest. He knows that he’s fucked up from how disappointed she sounds.

“Yeah.”

It’s awkward again. Like their last phone call. Katya had probably been on a run, she was panting and unfocused, raw frustration spewing from her lips into the receiver, her mouth had sounded dry and he could hear other people talking around her. It was why he’d hung up, sometimes she gets stuck on a topic and won’t let go, even if it’s the wrong moment to bring it up.

“We have to talk about it,” Katya whispers. Her voice is ice cold.

“Katya,” Trixie knows she’s going to snap at him.

“Brian, I’m fucking serious,” she’s more awake now, she’s probably remembering her anger and Trixie is sick to death of how she coddles him and tries to teach him right from wrong.

“God, will you, will you calm down? I’m going to explain-”

“No, shut up. Shut up for one second. Because I’m doing fucking _everything_ on my own. Everything. And if you don’t want to have this baby? Or care for this baby like I am? Or come home to be here while she grows? I don’t think you should be married to me.” 

Her voice has risen like this only a few times before. Trixie can count them on one hand, stacked up in the back of his mind. 

Once, when he’d almost killed himself falling off the ladder painting the house. Once, when he was wasted and had talked about her onstage. And once, when he’d forgotten one of her shows that he’d promised he would be at.

And then now, over their baby.

“Katya, no, fuck that. This isn’t fair. It’s not fair of you, I’m working _for_ our baby, okay, I’m working for you to be able to buy that yellow paint or for the baby to go to fucking college. Some things are more important and I don’t give a shit if you’re lashing out because you’re lonely. We agreed that I would keep working for four fucking months.”

Trixie is just spewing whatever comes to mind like he always does, he’s not thinking any of it through but what he _is_ thinking about is how much he misses her. And how bad he wants to fuck her when they’re both angry. This is why she’s angry with him.

“Yeah, yeah we fucking agreed, and I regret that. I take it back, okay? I didn’t know that you were so okay with being gone during all this, I didn’t know that you feel like it isn’t important,” he can hear her frustrated tears, and his heart is bursting. 

“Katya, don’t be fucking ignorant, okay, don’t try to manipulate me, I _do_ care, I care a whole lot, and I hate that I’m not there. I hate my entire goddamn life right now, I haven’t been happy in months and I’m done. I’m so fucking tired, okay,” Katya huffs a laugh, his heart sinks, of course the truth wouldn’t be good enough, he’s gone and fucked it all up forever now. She’s going to divorce him.

“Me too,” her voice is hoarse from screaming at him. She sounds tired, like he must, and he should have thought about it more and then he wouldn’t have yelled at her. She asks Maggie to sleep over, so she can rest with her fingers on her daughter, _their_ daughter. Because he isn’t there to prepare with her. And it’s killing him, roasting him alive from the inside out.

“I wish I could touch you,” Trixie is crying, suddenly, sobbing into the receiver. His whole body is shaking with it, and his stomach is a pit of tight knots. Katya is saying something but he can’t hear her over his own crying, and it’s so embarrassing but he can’t stop.

She doesn’t hang up on him, she lets him cry and cry until he’s all cried out, and his body aches, his hands from clenching them and his sides from sobbing. When he’s quieted down he can hear her slow breathing and he matches it, calms his sobs. She’s still sniffling a little every once in a while, she’s crying but she’s keeping herself calm for him. It’s usually the other way around. 

They’re going to be parents so soon. Trixie isn’t ready. He needs to be home with her.

“You can come home,” Katya whispers. Trixie presses his hand up to his mouth, swallows a sob. 

“Okay,” Trixie’s whole body is shaking. He has to cancel the shows, he can’t go another month. He can schedule extra things in LA.

“Can you. Do you think you can do the rest of the New York shows? It’s okay, it’s okay if you can’t, or if you don’t know, or,” Katya trails off. Trixie has never been so exhausted.

“I’ll do these last three and come home right after,” Trixie’s brow is heavy and pounding, his fingers are achey and stiff. 

“Okay, I’ll pick you up, okay, text me when your flight is. Trixie?” Katya’s voice cracks with the question.

“Yeah,” he whispers back. He’s about to fall back asleep. He’s cried himself out, all the fight is gone and now he just feels plain old guilty.

“I love you,” she says it loud, stable. 

“I love you too, Katya,” she hangs up. They’ll be okay. He’s only here for four more days. And she’ll be waiting for him at the airport.

```

Katya is waiting for him at the airport like she always is. But this time she’s right at his gate, with a cardboard sign that says “Trixie Mattel <3” on it in big sparkly pink letters. They haven’t used it in ages, not since Trixie would come back home to Boston after spending Christmas with his family. Which he hasn’t done alone in years.

She doesn’t even look nervous, standing there in the crowd of people, she’s just scanning the area for him and she’s glowing, her hair is shiny and her purple lipstick sticks out with her white t-shirt and denim skirt.

When she sees him her lips spread into a massive smile, her eyes squint with it and he can see her crow’s feet from where he’s walking towards her, twenty feet away.

“Trixie Mattel!” She yells to him, holds her arms wide open. She’s swaying on her feet, bending her knees excitedly, she’s half-laughing and he is too, picking up his pace to get to her sooner. He drops his bags and leaves his suitcase next to her to take her into his arms, kiss her hard on the mouth. He can feel her lipstick coming off onto his lips.

He pulls back and she wipes it off with a tissue from her back pocket, she’s already gotten to mom levels of preparedness and Trixie loves it, how she wipes his lips off with strong fingers, wheezing loud laughs at him. Everyone must be staring and Katya is loving it, he can tell.

Katya bends down to pick up the bent sign and two of his bags, so they can carry them evenly. She lets him pick up the other duffel bag and takes his hand unoccupied by his suitcase, starts to lead them out of the airport.

“How was your flight,” Katya is one step ahead of him, pulling him along. She’s had coffee, he can tell that she’s running low on sleep and her hair is still a little wet from her post-yoga shower. She’s all smiles, genuine smiles, she smells good, and they still have to talk about the fight but right now he can just walk with her, watch her smile at everyone that walks by.

“I slept, so,” Trixie can feel his phone buzzing in his pocket, it has to be his manager-- she’s not too happy about him cancelling the rest of his shows for the next month, but _he_ is and she can wait. Katya pulls him into a Starbucks before he can protest, orders them both coffees and waits for them tapping her jelly shoe on the floor. Her hands are on her elbows and she’s a little spacey today, he can tell. She looks cute, her eyes skimming over and over the menu as she waits.

“Excuse me?” Trixie whips his head around at the voice, and, sure enough, it’s a teenage girl that probably wants a photo. He smiles and greets her, but he also sneaks a look to where Katya is picking up their coffees. He wishes she would focus and look at him so that he could signal that she could leave and wait somewhere for this to be over. He gets it, why she doesn’t want to interact with his fans. And he doesn’t blame her one bit. But he can hear her plastic shoes clacking over to him, where he’s talking to the girl about makeup and the show she saw.

“Hey,” Katya passes his coffee over, sips her own from the straw. Trixie doesn’t know if he should introduce her, or ignore her, or what, he’s panicking and it’s awkward, the girl’s eyes are flitting between them. Katya rolls her eyes at him, then, and sticks her hand out to the girl for her to shake.

“I’m Katya, this one’s wife. I’m so sorry that you think he’s the shit,” she’s grinning widely, and the girl shakes her hand and giggles, and soon it’s twenty minutes later and they’re sitting at a table at Starbucks in LAX, talking about the productivity of drag. Trixie feels like he’s being battered like a fish, like he’s a ping-pong ball between them both. Katya is having the time of her life, she’s leaned in, her voice slides down to a whisper and up to almost a yell in just seconds. 

Trixie stays silent for almost the whole conversation, just watching Katya in her element, chatting away like she’ll do in the early mornings with him. He’s missed it, so much more now than ever, and maybe they’re getting more codependent but Trixie doesn’t care. His heart clenches every time she waves her hands around and he can see her ring.

They bid the girl goodbye after Katya’s followed her on instagram and accepted her follow request, taken the picture of her and Trixie, and Katya takes his hand again, walks him to the car. She’s still going on about the conversation and she knows that Trixie’s just half listening. So he doesn’t feel bad about letting her ramble, nodding along in the passenger seat. 

She looks so hot driving, eyes focused on the road, sometimes turning her head to engage Trixie, making eye contact as she babbles. He smiles when she looks at him, he’s so tired and he can’t wait to be home in the AC with her, just quietly talking about all the things they need to discuss. 

Years ago he would dread this kind of conversation, but now he’s not dreading it in the least. He wants to learn about her, everything he doesn’t know yet. He wants her to leave some to tell him when they’re ancient.

```

Katya waits for Trixie, seated on the couch. The sun is almost setting and she can feel him in the house with her, settling into her chest. It’s so calm, calmer than meditation, calmer than hiking, just nearly as calm as feeling Summer against her palm, against her lips, through skin.

“I’m sorry,” Trixie sits himself down next to her. She puts her legs in his lap, lets his hands circle them. 

“Thank you,” Katya whispers. “I accept your apology. And thanks for. You know, dealing with me when I was being a huge asshole.” Trixie’s fingers are massaging into her calves. He’s looking right into her eyes, and he’s blushing a little. She puts her hands over his.

“You weren’t an asshole,” Katya raises her eyebrows. “Well. You were, but so was I. And you. You stayed over the phone with me while I cried. And you picked me up from the airport. And you talked to that fan-”

“Okay, we don’t need to put all my good deeds in list format,” Katya laughs, squeezes his hands in hers. “I get it, I’m a caring woman, okay, Trixie,” she stops laughing, lets her face fall into something more serious. “We should just. We should always be open for change, yeah, not just you, I mean, I’m making mistakes, like, every single fucking day, you know, I called you like an idiot in a public park to yell at you, and that’s enormously stupid. I just,” she takes a deep breath and it’s a little shaky on the way out, Trixie is just looking at her like he always does, letting her finish. “I just think that we need to. We need to remove ourselves a little bit from our opinions, and our plans, and let ourselves breathe. Just. Just take time to reevaluate at any given moment. And be okay with that.”

Trixie nods, kisses her on the cheek. “Me too. I want to be, like, flexible, and. God, Katya, it wasn’t my fault, but I thought it was, you know? I was beating myself up for not coming home but I was just following the rules we had made up already. It was stupid and I missed you and I missed Summer and I don’t want anything to have to get confusing like that again.”

Katya nods, and they finish the conversation like spinning silk, slowly trailing off where it matters, where they’ve reached the best agreement. Katya’s feet are asleep, a little, and she digs her heels into Trixie’s thighs so he rubs them as she turns on HGTV, and they yell at idiotic couples on House Hunters until Trixie is nodding off on her shoulder. 

He wakes up, looks at her with low eyelids. 

“Come here,” she climbs over him, he’s hard from his nap and she pulls his shirt off, fingers on his birthmark, pinches his nipple so his head is thrown back. She kisses the sleep lines on his neck and fucks into him slowly, speeds up when he asks, sinks deep inside him and presses her thumbs into his stomach. He’s lost weight, and her knees are sharper, too. Their bodies are growing and shrinking in tandem, like they always have.

```

Katya wakes up in the middle of the night, sweaty and hot, and she hasn’t woken up like this in what feels like years. For a brief minute she thinks that she’s in Boston, that she’s fallen asleep in a wig and body, that Trixie is asleep next to her complete with baby fat and soft hair. But then her hand is on his arm and his skin is just a tiny bit different, the muscle a little harder, and he’s turning over, sleepily wrapping his arms around her.

“Go back to sleep,” he’s whispering in her ear, and she drifts off into the blueness, her lashes clumpy with mascara. She’s slept naked with him for years, hasn’t deviated from that norm in ages. And now he’s back and it feels just like any other night with him hot against her stomach and thighs, except now she feels the most settled she ever has. His arms are just like they’ve always been the past ten years, he smells the same, she’s breathing against his lips just like usual. 

Her limbs are heavy with sleep, heavy with quiet, and the wind is blowing in the window just a little bit. Trixie is snoring, right in her face, and she’s copying his breathing like she always does. 

Once when she was very young her mother told her that if she couldn’t fall asleep she could match her breaths, let them rock her to sleep in the lonely dark.

And she’s done it countless times, now, thousands of times, with Trixie’s breath, ever since the first night they ever fucked, had matched his slow breathing with her fluttering heart, trying to let her brain calm down, trying to let her mind stop running with worries about time and insecurities and questions. And it had worked, she had fallen off the gentle edge with his hand around her waist and his lips on her inner arm. The breath out of his nose tickling the skin of her arm had matched up with her heartbeat and her fingers had unclenched, and then she was waking up in his arms again the next morning.

And now she lets herself sleep knowing about lonely nights, knowing about Summer and knowing about the house that they’re living in, knowing about Trixie and knowing what he knows, knowing that he knows things about her that she doesn’t know about herself. 

And it’s so quiet, just like the stars when Pearl’s car had driven up to Jacques that first night, when she had stubbed out her cig and walked over to where Trixie was hanging out the passenger seat window, looking her up and down, smiling and taking her hand.

Trixie’s hand squeezes her hip a little bit and his snores shift, and she slides closer into him, kisses his sleeping lips.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Katya’s always had long-winded ideas about the best way to theoretically raise a child, the best way to show a child love and the best kind of support and open-mindedness necessary to ensure that a child would feel safe and happy at home and at school.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi....... back again
> 
> I was walking down memory lane with this fic this morning, going through the notebook I have filled with extra scenes and planning and little moments and I found this... it's one of my absolute favorite moments in this universe, and I had completely forgotten that I had written it one night at like 3am. S O here it is, we all get a peek of baby (not so much baby, 12-year-old) Summer and her parents! 
> 
> Hope you enjoy it, thank you for all of the kindness these past couple days <3 This is for all of you for being so nice and also because UNHhhh said, and I quote, "THIS IS SO AMAZING AND YOU H A V E TO SHARE IT," and I agreed.

“Trixie.” Katya is looking down at her phone, climbing onto the couch next to him. He’s watching another Dolly Parton documentary, and he’s so engrossed that he just huffs out a breath in acknowledgement of her presence. “Hey.”

He turns to face her, pauses Netflix. She’s pushing gray strands behind her ears and she looks hot, crow’s feet now permanent, apparent lines in her cheeks. Her red lipstick is bleeding a little.

“Yeah?” She smiles.

“We need to talk to Summer about her name,” she says matter-of-factly, and Trixie squints. 

“What do you mean,” Katya’s always had long-winded ideas about the best way to theoretically raise a child, the best way to show a child love and the best kind of support and open-mindedness necessary to ensure that a child would feel safe and happy at home and at school.

“You heard me,” she’s looking back down at her phone. She’s probably texting Alaska, they’ve been planning Summer’s 12th birthday party for weeks. 

“You’re right, I did. But I still don’t know what you _said_ ,” Trixie rolls his eyes. “What about her name?”

“Well if she likes it!” Katya is quick on the draw. These are the conversations that make Trixie want to scream, the ones where Katya, simply by being who she is, trans and whip smart and completely insane, has endless advantages that he can’t even begin to name or understand. He’s tried.

“I- no.” Trixie responds, and Katya’s head whips up from her phone, her gray curls that she’s gained from patiently growing out all the bleach damage bobbing at her shoulders. 

“The fuck do you _mean_ , no?” Katya’s eyes are ice cold, and Trixie can feel them snap down his entire body, absolutely freezing him. He wants to shrink down but he won’t.

“I mean, _no_. ‘S far as we know, she’s cis, and she’s already having a hard time with girls, and I don’t want to put her through any more pressure that she doesn’t need, okay, you of all people should know how stressful a name change would be. How the fuck is she even supposed to know what name she wants to be called for the rest of her life, anyways? She’s twelve.”

Trixie is out of breath and he takes a big one. Katya is mad. Really fucking mad. The wrinkles across her nose from her inner eyes are dug in deep, and Trixie can hear her lecture coming in like a freight train in her slow inhale. It’s terrifying. She perches, squats on the couch cushion so that she has a height advantage, too.

“Brian Michael Firkus-- god fucking damn it, you asshole, by the time I was old enough to know what gender was I knew I wasn’t a boy. And I sure don’t think that _my_ name change was that hard, ‘cause you _knew_ I didn’t want to be called Brian anyway,” She’s spitting through her teeth, it’s getting on his forearms. Her argument is ignoring a lot of his points and they both know it, and then her phone is ringing loudly between them and she’s giving him a dirty scowl, answering Alaska in faux joy, getting up and shutting the door of her studio behind her. It’s soundproofed. 

Trixie hates himself for even entertaining the thought that she would be shit-talking him. She needs space, he knows that she wouldn’t and she never has, she’d sooner get a hotel room for the night after chewing him out for hours on end.

So he goes about his day, leaves the studio early to pick Summer up from school, and as she babbles on about gym class in the passenger seat, making him laugh like only Katya can, he has a moment when she quiets at a red light where he begins to feel irredemably, heavily guilty.

He snaps out of it momentarily, just in time for Summer’s “Dad!” and the honks behind them to blare, the light burning green into his retinas.

“Is mom home?” Summer asks, looking down at her phone as they pull up in the driveway.

“She should be,” Trixie unlocks the doors and pulls his keys from the ignition, watches her skip up the front sidewalk, long brunette braids she’s finally learned how to do on her own swinging behind her.

He feels so, so guilty, so fucking gross, and he doesn’t know if he wants Katya to be home or not, doesn’t know what he’d say to her if she is. Doesn’t even begin or pretend to know how he’d apologize.

Summer is yelling along to the radio and Katya must be home because it’s blaring and the door is open waiting for them. Trixie is so fucked, so fucking beyond fucked. It’s heinous.

She’s standing with her soft hair, round shoulders, at the kitchen counter. She’s got one hip popped and she’s wheezing with sheer joy at one of the same jokes Summer had just tested on him in the car on the way home.

She doesn’t look at him, not when he drops his keys on the countertop, and not when she lets his fingers wrap around her wrist. He can feel the shame boiling deep in his stomach, it hurts physically, and it reminds him that he hasn’t eaten since breakfast.

“Katya,” he whispers. Summer has her headphones in and she’s singing along with whatever’s playing on them, it’s clashing with the radio in the specific way that gives Trixie a familiar pounding headache in his right temple that travels behind his ear to the back of his head. He wants to die.

“What.” She hisses back. She lets her eyes scan his face once, they’re almost gray and still so cold. “You sure you’ve got the right name, there?”

Trixie wants to melt into the floor, he can feel hot tears behind his eyelids and Katya sees them and smirks, raises her eyebrows. Trixie shakes his head fervently but she’s already turning her back to him, slamming her hand on the radio to turn it off, tapping Summer on the shoulder so that she pauses the song. The sudden quiet is agony. 

“You want to get ready? I was thinking we could go look at that skateboard,” Katya asks, and Summer shrieks with joy, jumps up from her chair to wrap her hands around Katya’s neck. 

“No way! Yes! Yes! Yes, I’m getting ready! Thanks, Mom!” She yells on her way to her room, socked feet sliding on the floor. Trixie holds himself back from telling her to be careful, somehow thinks that Katya might not appreciate it when she’s currently Summer’s single parental figure.

Katya puts Summer’s backpack on her dining room chair so that it’s ready for homework time later. Trixie’s knees are weak, and he wills her to turn back to him. He starts crying when she does, he can’t help it. His tears drip down his burning cheeks painfully hot, he swipes them away angrily. She’s staring him down, straight-faced, arms crossed, terrifying.

“Do you need something?” 

“I’m so sorry,” Trixie whispers. He can’t raise his voice because Summer might hear behind her bedroom door, because he can’t trust it not to crack.

“Are you,” Katya crosses the hardwood over to him. He gulps, and then her hands are on his shoulders, her lips on his gently, she’s digging her fingers in hard in contrast. His eyes are wide open where hers are closed, he’s taken aback by her actions and he isn’t afraid to admit it, he doesn’t have a single clue what she could possibly mean by kissing him in this moment.

“What?” He asks the second she pulls back. She laughs right in his face, brings her hands up to wipe his tears away. Her nails are bare but for a tiny little bit of green polish on her right thumb. 

“I’m going to fuck you so good tonight,” she whispers into his ear, grips his arm tightly. His eyes boggle and he squints at her. Maybe he does need glasses, like she always likes to tease him.

“What the fuck,” he says, and she laughs again.

“Trix, I accept your apology, I can see you know exactly what you did wrong, yeah?” Something crashes in Summer’s room and both of their heads whip to the closed door. 

“You okay in there!” Katya yells, right in Trixie’s ear. Summer responds in the affirmative and Katya turns back to face him. “You’re an idiot.”

“I know,” Trixie smiles a little. “I know I am. Thanks for dealing with me.”

Katya grins, kisses him again. And then Summer is coming out of her room and screeching at them for kissing, pulling Katya by the arm with her out to the car. Katya winks at him as they leave and he rolls his eyes, watches them pull out of the driveway through the front window.


End file.
